Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

collinmbarrett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–146 of 146 posts

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#141

Post by antifa »

kmeisthax wrote: post #7

>Additionally, most of the time web fonts are downloaded from a third-party delivery network such as Google Web Fonts or Adobe Fonts. One of the advantages of using these systems is that the likelihood that a visitor’s browser already has a font cached locally from a previous visit to any other site using the same font is relatively high. That likelihood is relatively low (though not as low as JS CDNs). Modern browse…

> >the likelihood that a visitor’s browser already has a font cached locally from a previous visit to any other site using the same font is relatively high.

>That likelihood is relatively low

That likelihood was never high, and obviously so, I have no idea why it gets parroted so much. And even if it was true, I could have shown up to your website with jQuery and bootstrap cached, but oops it was a different free cdn so cache miss.

The only thing you had a high likelihood of is customers noticing your website was slow without knowing its just your poorly chosen free cdn being temporarily over capacity.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#142

Post by manigandham »

legitster wrote: post #134
manigandham wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent 12 years in adtech and built 3 ad platforms from the ground up. Fingerprinting is used everywhere. It's a wide spectrum from basic metrics to very in-depth tracking, all depending on the scale, latency and functionality of each scenario. This can range from frequency capping to fraud detection to stopping bots, to uniquely identifying devices. I will say that it's mostly used to improve UX by increasing se…

How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time? How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device? How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers? How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data? I have yet to ever see a database of fingerprints or what it even looks like. It could very well be that advertisers keep it as part of…

> "How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time?"

Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable.

> "How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device?"

Fingerprints usually identify a device or specific user-agent. I'm not sure about the context for this but you can augment it with cookies to specify "user accounts".

> "How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers?"

How do you tie any random alphanumeric ID - whether stored as a cookie on device or recognized as a fingerprint - to a customer? Mappings still exist and work the same way.

> "How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data?"

What would be the conflict? Ideally only one is used as the primary identifier and takes precedence.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#143

Post by toastal »

asddubs wrote: post #115
toastal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally do all of that with SVGs sprites when the fill is set to currentColor.

Only with inline svgs, not if they're included via , I believe.

You can't inline a font as an either?? There are performance benefits to , but generally people recommend for SVGs.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#144

Post by asddubs »

toastal wrote: post #143
asddubs wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only with inline svgs, not if they're included via , I believe.

You can't inline a font as an either?? There are performance benefits to , but generally people recommend for SVGs.

the point I made in my original post was that a font is already an external resource and doesn't have to be intermingled with the rest of the code.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#145

Post by legitster »

manigandham wrote: post #142
legitster wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time? How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device? How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers? How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data? I have yet to ever see a database of fingerprints or what it even looks like. It could very well be that advertisers keep it as part of…

> "How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time?" Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable. > "How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device?" Fingerprints usually identify a device or specific user-agent. I'm not sure about the context for this but you can augment it with cookies to specify "user accounts". > "How do you tie a f…

> Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable.

How so? We have even deprecated IP Addresses in our database as we found they no longer have any sort of day to day accuracy (too many devices jumping networks constantly) or there are too many shared IPs for work networks. It seems like most fingerprints are just IP address + random identifiers.

Re: Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)

#146

Post by freediver »

duncanc4 wrote: post #73
freediver wrote: post #17

This feature is built-in in Orion browser.

Is it? I’m using Orion on iOS and privacy report has multiple google font domains being contacted by Orion.

On iOS it exists as a part of Data Saver feature. On Desktop it is a separate , stand-alone feature and can be configured per site.
Post reply on HN