Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
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Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#2As 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).
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#3As 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).
Totally agree.
Hosting assets like fonts or javascript on the same host is not only better for privacy, it's also more secure (no thirdparty can mess with your content) and contrary to popular belief also faster in a modern web environment.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#4As 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).
Bandwidth is a concern I assume.
What percentage of the data transferred is a font or JavaScript library?
If it's like 30% (I don't know, just guessing) then that's a portion of bandwidth that could have been used to serve users the site content.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#5But 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?
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#6But 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?
Still think this is a nice idea in theory. In practice I often vendor stuff like this, meaning I just don't use CDNs and deploy "local" copies. I could write a few pages about why this is a bad idea, but there are also some advantages.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#7As 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 that reason has turned from a positive into a probable negative, because it’s having to look up another domain name and open a new TLS connection—though if you’re serving the resources with HTTP/1.1 it might still be faster coming from a different origin, if you’re loading enough resources.
After that, the main advantage of Google Fonts doing the CSS serving is that it varies the CSS it serves by user-agent, to give you what your browser will cope with best, whether it be EOT, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, maybe they vary the response in other ways as well, I’m not sure. In practice, I think that benefit has run its course: I recommend that people don’t even bother with the bulletproof web fonts formula for supporting all the formats, but just serve woff2: fonts are fundamentally supposed to be optional (icon fonts are generally bad), and users of such ancient browsers as IE, EdgeHTML So then, I say that the only thing that remains is the neat packaging of the font files, subsetting, &c. And I say copying the files and serving them yourself is overall probably a very wise idea.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#8I just set browser.display.use_document_fonts=0 and don't worry about the privacy implications of font loading anymore.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#9But 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.
Re: Wikimedia FontCDN – an anonymizing, privacy-first reverse proxy to Google Fonts
#10My idea, a browser extension that downloads a mirror of the most popular fonts and intercepts requests to google inserting device local CSS instead. Might not be desirable for mobile devices, but with ample storage you get faster page loading and no telemetry sent to anyone.