Earlier quoted context omitted.
There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once. But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so…
> But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons I didn't heard about this thing until today, are you sure that it is already implemented in all major browsers? I have found this source [1] but for what I can tell, at the moment this feature is behind a flag in chromium and firefox (maybe it is already implemented in Safari). [1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away
Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#32Why are people adding external fonts everywhere? Aren't there enough fonts built in browsers to make most people happy?
You mean Roboto everywhere? Maybe I have a preference for Lora in the headlines because it goes good with another font in mass text? Fonts are commonly underrated but take a look at some cooperate identities ... you recognize Mercedes every time you see a truck with ads of Mercedes on it because of what? You guessed it right ... fonts. This wouldn't be possible if everyone would use Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman…
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Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#33As much as I hate to post a pessimistic "Just do X instead" comment... why not just serve the fonts locally? It's no more difficult than serving any other asset. And if you're worried about privacy, then serving files locally removes any dependency on a third-party server at all (or two in this case).
There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once. But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so…
Picking the font based on the browser – surely there's an open source plugin for NGINX or something that could replicate this?
This is a perfect sort of thing as a Caddy plugin too. Or a CDN provider to provide this out of the box.
The CloudFlare people could do this in a weekend probably and I'd happily sign up because I'm less concerned about my privacy with CF than with Google.
But is this even an issue? If you declare the 4 different formats, won't the browser know to request the best one automatically?
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#34As much as I hate to post a pessimistic "Just do X instead" comment... why not just serve the fonts locally? It's no more difficult than serving any other asset. And if you're worried about privacy, then serving files locally removes any dependency on a third-party server at all (or two in this case).
There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once. But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so…
There are also another advantage: font subsetting. Google Font automatically subset large fonts. This doesn't really matter for Latin, but for CJK where an entire font can be >10MB, Google Font automatically subset it into >100 files, partitioned by the general usage frequency.
I served my own fonts, but subsetting those font aren't trivial matter. Personally I just grabbed the unicode range that Google Font used and generate my own subsets, but it is not that trivial.
(The reason I served my own font is actually because some font on Google Font are not up to dated, and I actually abuse the unicode-range to use different fonts for different scripts)
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once. But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so…
There are also another advantage: font subsetting. Google Font automatically subset large fonts. This doesn't really matter for Latin, but for CJK where an entire font can be >10MB, Google Font automatically subset it into >100 files, partitioned by the general usage frequency. I served my own fonts, but subsetting those font aren't trivial matter. Personally I just grabbed the unicode range that Google Font used and…
I was talking specifically of the advantages of global CDNs. Font subsetting is something Google Fonts covers and handles very well for the most common use cases, but is nothing to do with the global CDN.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There used to be advantage to using global CDNs: you would only need to download each font file once. But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons (“hmm, judging by how fast these ten resources loaded (and how slowly these other thirty resources loaded), you had these ten in your cache; and such-and-such a sensitive site just happens to load those ten resources and none of the rest…”), so…
> But now, browsers don’t share caches between origins for privacy reasons I didn't heard about this thing until today, are you sure that it is already implemented in all major browsers? I have found this source [1] but for what I can tell, at the moment this feature is behind a flag in chromium and firefox (maybe it is already implemented in Safari). [1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away
You are correct and I was wrong; I had thought it had been shipped, but it shipped behind a flag.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#37This is on toolforge, so while it's technically on Wikimedia run infrastructure (Wikimedia cloud services), the tool itself is maintained by a community member. If you use this outside of the Wikimedia cloud services environment (toolforge and Cloud VPS), then you're asking for trouble.
My guess is someone added this tool for other tools to use. There's no way this is being used on the production wikis.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#38But this is too slow to me. 400ms vs 23ms. I'm in Asia and it redirects me to new zealand. other wiki site redirected to US server. where can I find the wiki CDN network map?
This isn't going through the Wikimedia CDN network. It's on wikimedia cloud services, which is a free computing infrastructure (OpenStack/K8s) for community members to build community maintained tooling for Wikimedia.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#39The same objections that apply to Cloudflare in various other “anonymization via CDN” posts apply here as well: it’s only anonymizing the data Google sees, but the operator of the proxy can still harvest and profit from non-anonymous data. Be sure you trust the operator of this proxy^ to act in your best interest when evaluating whether to use this.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#40But this is too slow to me. 400ms vs 23ms. I'm in Asia and it redirects me to new zealand. other wiki site redirected to US server. where can I find the wiki CDN network map?
This has a map of the Wikipedia colocation sites: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Clusters I'm wondering a bit about your new zealand redirect, as there is no colocation site in new zealand on that map at least.
my bad. that's Netherlands