The Fastest Google Fonts

I'm involved in fonts for my native language (Sinhalese), and let me tell you: dealing with fonts for multiple languages are is not easy! Some of the Asian languages including Sinhalese are pretty difficult to get right, and glyphs are quite difficult to give a character without breaking their meaning, specially when it comes ZWJs, diacritics, etc.

You can subset a font like Noto to serve your languages, but it will come pretty large. Note that for web, @font-face declarations can set a Unicode character range for each font file, so browser downloads those fonts only when necessary.

Surely if there is one thing we have learned from the culture of comparative testing in recent years, it is that assumption is the mother of all #$%& ups.

Everyone commenting in this discussion to the effect that all sites should use system default fonts is making a huge assumption that using other fonts does not have a material effect on anything that matters to the user and/or the site owner. And yet, both in industry and in academia, lots of research has been done that did observe changes in outcomes even from relatively subtle (at least to an untrained eye) changes in typography.

If someone wants to argue that they personally do not like web fonts then of course they are free to block them. Any major content blocker on their platform of choice will do this easily enough. But if someone wants to argue that everyone else should avoid web fonts, they had better bring data. In this entire discussion, I don't see much of that, only personal preferences and the odd anecdote about a bug in a specific situation.

The website loads from start to finish in 200ms on my end (in Berlin of course). At this point, DNS and server distancs are bigger issues than what's on the page. I find the call for system fonts rather funny, because it's such a pointless sacrifice.

Another significant benefit is privacy. I don't like sending visitor information to third parties. I removed Google Fonts requests, and I'm working on removing Analytics. Once this is done, there won't be any third party requests on the page.

If my web page downloads a font to a browser for that browser to use, every browser capable of downloading that font will use that font.

If my web page specifies a list of fonts that users may or may not have on their system, every browser may display a different font from that list (or even a font not from that list).

I suppose YMMV and all that, but I would say the first case is clearly giving a more consistent result than the second case. That doesn't make the second case "bad," per se, but on my system Hacker News is in Verdana and on different distributions of Linux it's in... shrug emoji? There's a Microsoft Core Fonts package floating around out there, but not everybody has it installed. And lately it's become fashionable to specify a font stack of "default system fonts," so Macs get San Francisco, Windows 7+ users get Segoe UI, etc. That's fine, and maybe it's exactly what you want... but don't call it "consistent."

I almost guarantee you have fonts on your system installed that you will not want me to use on a web page, and I can also almost guarantee you that there are a lot of pages out there that have "custom fonts" that are just fine. They're just fine! Nobody reads a web page set in Charter or Franklin Gothic or any other rational typeface for body text and screams in outrage at its illegibility.

Maybe there are designers out there who want to force terrible horrible no-good custom fonts down your throat because they want to make your reading experience worse. Maybe there are web pages set in Zapfino and Wingdings. I don't know. But when you say "custom fonts," I say "professional high-quality typeface that is consistent across all browsers." That's it. That's all I'm trying to give you.

SVG is a nice option for logos. You can inline the SVG file directly into the HTML as well so there's no loading delay - especially useful for logos that need to be rendered immediately at the top of the page.