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Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

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Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#11

Post by darkhorn »

eps wrote: post #2

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

Google Fonts, Google Public DNS, Google Analytics, Google+ like gadgets, Google Adsense, Google CDN for jQuery etc, Google services like Search and Gmail, Embedded Youtube videos, Google Chrome word correction sugesstions and safe sites checks, Firefox safe page checks, probably many things within Android backend.

Probably they know with 99.9999999% accuracy how many online web users are out there.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#12

Post by RexRollman »

byjove wrote: post #10
eps wrote: post #2

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

Only reason huh? nothing to do with prettifying the web and making developers happy, because that doesn't benefit Google in any way...

Not directly it doesn't.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#13

Post by putlake »

unknownian wrote: post #5
eps wrote: post #2

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

Is it against the TOS to download the font and host it on your own server? It's very simple to do even though they don't give instructions.

I am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads).

Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M

Google Fonts makes a lot of optimizations that are platform-specific. e.g. serve smaller files to Macs, larger files to Windows. It is not worth doing all this yourself.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#14

Post by recuter »

This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen.

Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#15

Post by pandringa »

untog wrote: post #3
eps wrote: post #2

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

Yep, like everything, it's a trade off. In return you get a very robust platform and free fonts.

In return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#16

Post by RexRollman »

afsina wrote: post #7
eps wrote: post #2

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

So you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.

They are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#17

Post by afsina »

recuter wrote: post #14

This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen. Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?

I think these stats are more accurate than many others (I am looking at you Net Applications). However, Most of the popular large sites (Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, e-bay and Chinese stuff etc.) do not use Google Fonts so IE stats are skewed.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#18

Post by recuter »

afsina wrote: post #17
recuter wrote: post #14

This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen. Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?

I think these stats are more accurate than many others (I am looking at you Net Applications). However, Most of the popular large sites (Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, e-bay and Chinese stuff etc.) do not use Google Fonts so IE stats are skewed.

For all intents and purposes those are outliers that can be ignored anyway unless you happen to be a Top25 website yourself.

Re: Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

#19

Post by jfb »

RexRollman wrote: post #16
afsina wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.

They are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.

I personally think that Google does things like this because they can; they are not under money pressure (yet?) to have to really try to extract maximum value from every bit served or watt consumed, and can thus spend energy on initiatives like this that improve the web as a platform -- it's at best an indirect benefit, but fits their overall corporate strategy. And, it's cool.

I have my doubts about Google, but I don't have a problem giving them the benefit of the doubt here.

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