[HN Gopher] Google Fonts Analytics
___________________________________________________________________
Google Fonts Analytics
Author : rememberlenny
Score : 110 points
Date : 2020-02-19 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fonts.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fonts.google.com)
| boarnoah wrote:
| It looks like its lumping Android in with desktop linux. Since
| they are differentiating platforms by the user agent that seems
| like an easy thing to fix?
| zelly wrote:
| Desktop Linux is a rounding error
| jsnell wrote:
| The OS table has entry for X11 with maybe 2-3% shaer; I'd bet
| that's desktop Linux.
| Symbiote wrote:
| That's an impressive figure. Macintosh (desktop Mac?) is
| slightly less than double the X11 figure.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share has Linux usage at
| just under 1%.
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that more Linux users are blocking
| the ad networks that StatCounter utilizes to collect their
| data than Linux users that block requests to
| fonts.google.com.
| cronix wrote:
| Yeah, 36 trillion requests slowing down the loading of websites.
| Way, unnecessarily, overused.
| paulmendoza wrote:
| If google embedded the top fonts in the browser this wouldn't
| be an issue. I don't understand why the font selection in
| browsers is so limited.
| btown wrote:
| Practically there's no difference between a browser that
| lazily downloads builtin fonts, and a global URL for a font
| file across websites with an extremely long TTL. And you
| don't want the browsers to be even more bloated than they
| already are!
| gioele wrote:
| > font file across websites with an extremely long TTL.
|
| Caches are no longer shared across domains because doing so
| leads to privacy leaks: https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-
| cache-is-going-away
| sp332 wrote:
| -
| anamexis wrote:
| The parent comment's point is that this cache is
| partitioned by frame origin (which the link details).
| hinkley wrote:
| Then why are there 36 trillion requests?
| r0bbbo wrote:
| A lot of people using a lot of fonts from a lot of
| different browsers. I'm sure the caching techniques
| aren't perfect but they're probably quite good.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's been a while now, but at one point there were some
| numbers that came in that showed that a much higher
| fraction of user agents arrive at a web site with a
| completely empty cache [than you might expect].
|
| Enough so that if you rely on caching for user
| experience, your average user is not going to have a good
| time.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| There is a HUGE difference:
|
| - not all sites use CDN, even if using the same font
|
| - not all sites use the same CDN
|
| - users clear the cache (clearing history does that on
| firefox)
|
| - incognito mode is a thing
|
| - first load matters a lot
|
| - browser have a limit of the disk space they use for
| cache, and they evict older entries when they reach it.
| Given sites are now bloated, this fills up fast.
|
| - this repeats for each browser. I have 5 on my laptop, 3
| on my mobile, 2 on my tablet.
| basseq wrote:
| Font selection _in browsers_ isn 't limited. Browsers don't
| have embedded fonts--they rely on whatever fonts are
| installed in the operating system.
|
| The challenge is that to ensure consistency, you need to use
| the "lowest common denominator" of fonts that are installed
| _by default_ across _all operating systems_. Which leaves you
| with (like) Arial, Times, Courier, Verdana, Georgia,
| Palatino, and (hahahaha) Comic Sans.
|
| The real answer here is why web designers use Google Fonts as
| opposed to embedding their own fonts. To which the answer is:
| it's so much easier. (Tech, licensing, formats,
| compatibility, etc.)
| penagwin wrote:
| I think what they mean is why don't browsers just include
| the most popular fonts, so the underlying OS doesn't
| matter?
|
| Instead we're restricted to only a few fonts that actually
| have decent cross platform support.
| tobr wrote:
| The only way to do that would be to include particular
| typefaces as part of the CSS specification, rather than
| just the generic font-family keywords like "sans-serif"
| and "monospaced". But who should pick them, which ones
| would they pick, and how would they be licensed?
|
| It's kind of the same problem as saying that the browser
| should include common images. Which images? Why? How
| many?
| est31 wrote:
| > It's kind of the same problem as saying that the
| browser should include common images. Which images? Why?
| How many?
|
| Images follow a different usage distribution than fonts.
| I'd say that the top 100 fonts are enough to render most
| web content, for images I'd say this is obviously
| different, the top 100 images might appear often but not
| as often as the top 100 fonts.
|
| Google is already distributing the equivalent for text,
| in the form of the brotli corpus which ships in every
| Chrome installation.
| basseq wrote:
| _> why don 't browsers just include the most popular
| fonts, so the underlying OS doesn't matter?_
|
| Well, pontificating here:
|
| 1. Because many applications _don 't_ ship with
| additional fonts, and it's an additional layer of
| complexity. Some do--Microsoft Word comes to mind, IIRC.
|
| 2. Because you're still left with the same problem:
| unless _all_ browsers can agree on an additional set of
| standard fonts, you as a web developer will only want to
| use those installed by Chrome _and_ Edge _and_ Safari
| _and_ Firefox.
|
| 3. Because licensing for desktop application may (?) be
| more of a pain than licensing for web usage. Which may
| not matter for Google Fonts, since they may be the
| license holder for all anyway. I don't know.
| pcwalton wrote:
| > Which leaves you with (like) Arial, Times, Courier,
| Verdana, Georgia, Palatino, and (hahahaha) Comic Sans.
|
| Not Palatino.
|
| And most of those fonts have licenses that are inconvenient
| at best. The only thing that allows them to be packaged for
| Linux distributions is Microsoft's '90s-era "Core Fonts for
| the Web" initiative. This initiative is long discontinued,
| and so the fonts cannot be downloaded from Microsoft
| anymore. Only the '90s versions of the fonts are free.
| Worse yet, the license forbids packaging the fonts in any
| way other than with their original 32-bit Windows
| installer, which means that hacks like cabextract are
| necessary to install them on any other system.
| jsw wrote:
| That sweet, sweet traffic data.
| trillic wrote:
| The top fonts aren't the issue for page loading, they'll be
| cached 99% of the time. It's more obscure fonts that actually
| hit the server causing the issue.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Last I checked, browsers don't come with fonts. Browsers use
| the OS's fonts if a webpage doesn't have them. I'd rather
| browsers not maintain their own fonts.
| StLCylone wrote:
| Loading fonts is tracking and data collection. It's what
| Google does. If they build the fonts into the browser, then
| tracking/data collections calls are not made.
| jjeaff wrote:
| They could embed it in Chrome. If someone is using Chrome,
| google doesn't need any more points of data. They know
| everything you do.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah but you can sort of opt out of tracking by chrome,
| so its best to have fallbacks to be able to track all the
| things!
| thrower123 wrote:
| So many things about the web would be better if browsers
| shipped basic functionality.
|
| I cringe when I think about how many petabytes of jQuery has
| been sent over the wire over the years.
| basilgohar wrote:
| But they do. Javascript itself has evolved significantly
| over the past decade obsoleting many features that used to
| solely be provided by add-on frameworks.
|
| HTML5 as a living standard brings the majority of the needs
| that used to be served by plugins - interactivity, dynamic
| pages, two-way communications, multimedia.
|
| WebSockets provide for realtime communications with the
| browser, something again not possible without 3rd-party
| plugins.
|
| So, what you are saying is in fact happening. But that
| doesn't mean it's not an issue with sliding goalposts. It's
| just that it doesn't happen as quickly as we all may like
| it, but that's because "basic functionality" is a
| constantly moving target with different definitions
| depending on who asks.
| sp332 wrote:
| Decentraleyes is a browser extension that locally stores
| the most popular CDN-hosted JS libraries, including
| Angular, Backbone, and jQuery.
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...
| Reedx wrote:
| What's a better solution if you want to use a non-standard
| font?
|
| At least in this case a lot of the requests are cached across
| sites.
| omnimus wrote:
| The problem si that number of "standard" fonts are thining.
| It sucks having different widths of fonts on different
| platforms. You will have to load some webfont if you want
| consistency.
| irrationalactor wrote:
| The sterile world you desire is not one I'd like to live in.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's like my desire for quality CLI apps and APIs before any
| sort of fancy schmancy GUI. The important part is reminding
| one's self that the other 99% of people want and need the GUI
| version of the app.
| sp332 wrote:
| CSS, HTML, images, text content all slow down websites. Oh wait
| they ARE the websites!
| perardi wrote:
| In anticipation of "ugh, designers are ruining the web custom
| fonts", I'm glad that variable fonts are starting to percolate
| out.
|
| https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux...
|
| Less overall file size, less HTTP requests. Combine that with
| preloading and font-display, we're getting to the point where
| webfonts aren't a giant bandwidth suck.
|
| https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...
|
| (More room for ad tracking scripts instead!)
| keriati1 wrote:
| How much data traffic could google save if it would just bundle
| all fonts with chrome?
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| how much space would packing all those fonts take up?
| LukeBMM wrote:
| With some extra metadata, about 428MB.
|
| https://github.com/google/fonts
|
| Since the browser hands font rendering off to the operating
| system, however, the most pertinent browser-specific
| adjustment would be updating the (configurable) defaults
| (Serif, Sans-serif, etc...) for each supported platform -
| Georgia instead of Times for a default, for example.
| moftz wrote:
| You bundle the top 10 most popular fonts and save about
| half the traffic: counter is ticking about 20M per minute
| or 201B per week, top 10 fonts were used 136B times this
| week, Chrome is about 3/4 of users. Bundling would save
| (136/201)*(3/4) = about 1/2. However, Google would lose
| about half of their tracking events so I'm sure they've
| already thought of this and figured the data is worth more
| than the traffic expenses.
| basilgohar wrote:
| Yeah, let's just install the Internet Archive on everyone's
| computer and be done with it. </snark>
| ckdarby wrote:
| How to track everyone, everywhere.
| [deleted]
| basilgohar wrote:
| Pretty much. Provide a basic service to the Internet and get
| the benefit of sucking-in all that usage data. Here's to hoping
| we somehow figure out how to use something in the future
| without handing over our data at the same time. And don't tell
| me "we did this to ourselves because we didn't want to pay for
| it with money, so we pay for it with privacy", you pay
| companies and they still do this. It's just too tempting for
| companies to miss it. We need regulatory protections for
| individuals' rights over corporations' rights and it needs
| strength behind to be enforced.
|
| Answers? Oh, I don't have them, I am just pointing out the
| problem.
| leahcim wrote:
| I'm surprised that Linux is the most popular client for this.
| skosch wrote:
| That's probably because Android isn't listed separately.
| tmnvix wrote:
| I'm guessing that's android.
| iamdual wrote:
| Most of the crawler bots also mentions Linux in its user agent.
| rococode wrote:
| Anyone know what's up with "Slabo 27px"? Looks like its recent
| usage is much lower than other fonts with similar totals (it's at
| 800m views in the last 7 days while the fonts above and below it
| are all ~4b). Also the only font I haven't heard of in the top
| 20, though maybe I just happened to miss it every time.
| pietrasagh wrote:
| In my "humble" oppinion only three most significant (decimal)
| digts count if you are looking at growth.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| It's long past time for p2p networks to make this number
| meaningless / unknowable!
| smaili wrote:
| Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for
| Google? I can't see selling fonts data as something desirable by
| 3rd party companies but maybe that's just me?
| cosmie wrote:
| Google doesn't directly sell data in the first place - they
| leverage the data they have to improve the value of their ad
| network (in the form of enhanced targeting and attribution
| capabilities). It's actually in their best interest to
| _protect_ the data they have on you, as it's a primary
| competitive advantage they have over other ad networks.
|
| As far as the unsavory interpretation of how they could
| conceivably use Fonts data to further that end: calls to
| download their fonts are another touchpoint with the Google
| ecosystem, and a theoretical vector for further tracking the
| browsing behavior and device graph of an individual.
|
| That said, traditional font licensing for commercial use is
| absolutely bonkers[1][2][3]. Even if Google is using the data
| they collect from serving font files to feed into their user
| tracking, they've done a service to the web[4].
|
| [1] https://designshack.net/articles/typography/what-is-a-
| font-l...
|
| [2] Working at a creative agency, I learned that we can't so
| much as legally use a client-dictated (and licensed) font in a
| mockup without paying thousands of dollars for a license
| ourselves.
|
| [3] Webfonts tend to be licensed on a per-pageview basis. One
| client got hit with a temporary flood of scraping/bot traffic,
| and the biggest economic impact was the unexpected six-figure
| font bill that month. We convinced them to put the site behind
| Cloudflare and used a Worker to strip out the font include for
| suspected bot traffic and inadvertently lowered their licensing
| cost by more than our annual retainer.
|
| [4] I can't say how it is everywhere, but working at one of the
| top three marketing agencies, Google Fonts are the only
| approved open-source fonts we're allowed to use (since they're
| primarily free for commercial use, as well). Not every client
| is able or willing to absorb a 5-6 figure font line item for
| every engagement, so without Google Fonts we'd (and I presume
| other major agencies) would be stuck with using system default
| fonts everywhere.
| speedgoose wrote:
| In addition to some data from websites which do not use Google
| analytics, they may like to have the power of pushing the
| "comic sans ms" font or having a * { display: none !important;}
| for non chrome browsers.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any
| tracking.
| skosch wrote:
| Their FAQ says that they don't (currently) use cookies, but
| it also includes the sentence "Google Fonts logs records of
| the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data
| is kept secure", so they could still do some IP-based
| analytics.
|
| More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight
| into web traffic (many users block Google Analytics, but
| almost everyone loads web fonts), and it allows them to crawl
| websites more easily - before web fonts, many websites used
| pre-rendered PNGs to show web-unsafe fonts, which made
| crawling impossible.
|
| Google has poured a lot of money into this, the fonts are
| free and open source, and the users aren't the product.
| Overall, I think it's a rare win-win story in this age of
| dystopian adtech.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > Google has poured a lot of money into this
|
| Why, though? Not charity, I'd assume. The only other
| answers I can come up with are pretty damn nefarious.
| vatueil wrote:
| The parent comment said:
|
| > _it allows them to crawl websites more easily - before
| web fonts, many websites used pre-rendered PNGs to show
| web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling impossible_
| cameronbrown wrote:
| > it allows them to crawl websites more easily - before
| web fonts, many websites used pre-rendered PNGs to show
| web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling impossible.
| raphlinus wrote:
| I can speak to this a little, in terms of pitches we made
| to management to get resources for our little project.
| None of this is authoritative.
|
| 1. A _lot_ of text was rendered into PNGs, and that made
| the web less searchable, as well as less accessible,
| slower to load, and less mobile-friendly. All 4 of these
| factors do have economic impact at Google scale.
|
| 2. Fonts were one of the few features that Flash had that
| HTML5 was lacking, and we wanted to accelerate that
| transition. Again, mobile was one of the major driving
| factors.
|
| 3. For a while, we were organizationally funded under
| Google Docs. Again, fonts were one of the major missing
| features compared with Microsoft Office, so filling that
| gap was strategic. Here, our open source approach really
| paid off, otherwise dealing with proprietary font
| licensing in the context of documents that can be shared
| and copied would have been nightmarish.
|
| 4. To the extent that you are able to make the case that
| fonts make ads better (or advertisers happier), getting
| modest amounts of funding ceases to be a problem. To be
| clear, when I was on the team this was more of a glimmer
| of future abundant resources than day-to-day reality.
|
| Lastly, while "charity" isn't exactly the right word, the
| motivations of the people working on the team are/were
| basically that we love fonts and want to make the
| Internet better. At Google scale, we were able to sell
| the project using basically a combination of the above
| arguments.
|
| Never once when I was on the team were we asked to
| implement any form of individual user tracking, nor did I
| hear a suggestion of such a thing. All our work on
| collecting analytics was to improve performance and
| quantify our impact. I have no reason to believe things
| have changed on that front since I was directly involved.
| jackhack wrote:
| yet.
| partiallypro wrote:
| They likely do get some data from it, their own analytics
| page has data they pull from it.
| draw_down wrote:
| Who said anything about third parties?
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| it should link to the font so we can see them
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| Granted my own wish :)
|
| https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Might be a bit of a dumb question. But when I load google.com and
| look at the requests. It has fonts.google.com says 200 and 'from
| memory cache' is that actually sending a request in any way to
| Google? Or is that actually handled locally? Most of the time I
| am getting this, so not seeming to make actual requests to them
| the majority of the time. Is it actually hitting their servers
| for these tracking stats, or is something like that not even
| making it to these stats?
| raphlinus wrote:
| 200 means it's hitting your cache and not doing any network
| requests. The analytics are based on actual HTTP requests. At
| the time I was there, we were only able to make rough guesses
| about the fraction of queries that were successful in the
| client cache, we didn't have any systematic way to dig into
| that.
| zelly wrote:
| It depends on the cache control headers sent by the original
| asset. If you want to make sure you don't hit the CDN, install
| the Decentraleyes browser extension.
| raphlinus wrote:
| At the time I was there, we aggressively set the cache
| control headers to minimize the number of requests. Among
| other things, the font binaries were all versioned and served
| so each URL was immutable forever. (There's some subtlety
| around this, it's a 2 stage process with CSS first then the
| font binaries, and the CSS was generally served with 24 hour
| expiration).
|
| One motivation was sharing the cache among all sites that
| linked the fonts, which at the time I think was a big win,
| but as has been mentioned elsewhere, this is going away.
| daveslash wrote:
| [ctrl]+[home] keyboard shortcut doesn't work on this page in
| FireFox. I had some trouble with [ctrl]+[end]. It's quite
| disappointing to see basic webpage/document functionality broken
| on a site claiming to improve the web experience. Maybe I'm just
| an old-fashioned web user.
| sbr464 wrote:
| Get the raw JSON stats & font info with below links. Use httpie
| for color/formatted results (replace curl with http):
| curl https://fonts.google.com/metadata/stats curl
| https://fonts.google.com/metadata/fonts
| aloer wrote:
| The operating system stats are interesting.
|
| Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac
| total requests. The overall market share per wikipedia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...)
| is something like 7% for Apple.
|
| Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some
| way so I wonder where that difference comes from
|
| - windows breaks faster and must be replaced more often,
| increasing the number of sold windows systems per year
|
| - windows users use computers differently? Must be a pretty big
| thing to cause such a difference
|
| - more windows systems not connected to the internet?
|
| I kinda doubt that the typical enterprise windows setup with
| strict firewall rules etc. will have a meaningful impact on web
| fonts and IE 6+ seems to support google fonts
| (https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_su...)
|
| Any ideas?
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Windows computers cost half as much, more or less, for the same
| specs so the replacement rate is probably much higher. Like for
| the same price you can buy a PC laptop every 2 years vs 1 Mac
| laptop every 4 years.
|
| When I worked at Apple, the plastic MacBooks outsold everything
| else because they were cheapest. It was weird that we did all
| our power/performance benchmarks on a $2000 15" MacBook Pro
| when they only made up 10-15% of Mac sales.
|
| From that time, we also knew that Macs were extremely popular
| for home use, IIRC something like 30-40% penetration, but
| people were using Windows for work or being given a Windows
| laptop from work for personal use.
|
| One of the reasons Apple never made a Netbook was that it was
| an inferior good. People, when asked, prefered a larger screen
| and trackpad but couldn't afford it. The bottom-tier 11"
| MacBook Air and the iPad were a response to upsell that demand.
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| Price has nothing to do with replacement rate. There are many
| bad laptop brands, though.
|
| 30% penetration in the USA. Here we are talking about global
| usage. In many other first-world countries Macs are nowhere
| to be seen, eg 3%.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| > 30% penetration in the USA. Here we are talking about
| global usage.
|
| Then later in this same thread you say:
|
| > Webpages in non-latin alphabets probably use way less
| fonts from Google Fonts.
|
| So uh, which is it?
| twhb wrote:
| There are Windows machines for high end and low end, but macOS
| machines only for high end. Low end includes all your grandmas,
| unused workstations, and people apathetic about computers
| because they don't use them much. All your laptops kept folded
| under dorm beds and used only for assignments.
|
| The same effect shows up to a greater degree on mobile, where
| Android has something like three times iOS's units sold yet the
| same amount of mobile traffic and half as much app store
| revenue.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Anecdotally, people use their Macs a lot longer than Windows
| users. In part because of the price difference.
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| Webpages in non-latin alphabets probably use way less fonts
| from Google Fonts. And Macs are way more popular in English-
| speaking countries than anywhere else.
| politelemon wrote:
| The stats are interesting but do not warrant such a
| condescending/misrepresentative view; they could easily be
| twisted around, for example, to say
|
| - Macos has broken browsers and doesn't cache, resulting in
| multiple font downloads per website browsing session.
|
| - Macos use computers differently? Do they refresh the page
| multiple times racking up a download count?
|
| The first odd thing about the stats is Linux's share; with a 2%
| market share it's racked up 10T downloads. A major part of that
| is Android based browsers, but a decent part of that will be
| Linux desktop users, developers, automation tests and so on.
| Overall we should expect users' browsing habits playing a part;
| there may be a large shift towards mobile/tablet web
| consumption and reduced desktop web consumption causing a stats
| skew.
| lotyrin wrote:
| Any time CI hits a site with these fonts integrated an
| ephemeral session (no cache) probably has to download them.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I think it's almost certainly due to average browsing habit
| differences between Mac and Windows users. The Mac userbase is
| likely wealthier on average and more likely to be in a
| design/product/publishing profession, which influences the type
| of website they would frequent.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Wow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would
| cost you more than $1 Billion USD.
| paxys wrote:
| Got a source for that, or did you just make it up? Doing some
| very quick estimation I can't see it being more than $40-60
| million, and that is using retail pricing.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Curious, what would Cloudflare fronting OVH / Scaleway /
| Hetzner / S3 / Backblaze cost? I guess, apart from the major
| expense signing up for Cloudflare's enterprise plan, not much?
| simplyinfinity wrote:
| Hetzner bandwidth was 2 euro per TB last I checked :)
|
| Edit. It's now apparently 1 euro /tb without vat
| humblebee wrote:
| What is GSA? A little searching hasn't brought up anything I
| could see being a browser.
|
| The closest I could find was Google Search Appliance but I
| wouldn't think that is applicable to these stats.
| brandonhorst wrote:
| Google Search App. The app called "Google" on Android and iOS.
| raphlinus wrote:
| I was part of the team that founded this, about 10 years ago if
| memory serves. I'm still loosely involved, though no longer at
| Google. Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original
| launch, and we're now in the process of launching it as a
| variable font, with both width and weight axes. I'm also getting
| funding from them for Rust-based font tools.
|
| Feel free to AMA, though no guarantees I'll have good answers.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Was this created in order to track users across different sites
| or because google wanted to make the world a better place? :)
| [deleted]
| raphlinus wrote:
| The latter.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Do you think it's still used for the latter rather than the
| former now?
| raphlinus wrote:
| Heh, that's a better question. I have no reason to
| believe that Google Fonts are being used to track users,
| but I don't have hard evidence on this either way. I am
| deeply concerned about the way the modern Internet is
| turning into a surveillance machine and its potential for
| abuse, but if I were evil, I'd probably go after much
| lower hanging fruit than fonts.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Thanks for this honest answer.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I think Google might have better ways to track people.
| Fonts are also cached by CDNs and the local browser so
| I'm not sure if they provide good tracking data (they get
| loaded only for the first page visit for example and
| popular fonts like Open Sans are probably already in your
| cache when you open a page).
|
| If you're concerned about tracking as a website operator
| you can simply load the fonts from your own server, most
| of them can be found on Github and have liberal licenses
| (I think all fonts on fonts.google.com)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| You can even install the fonts locally to your machine
| and your browser will favor the local copy. There are
| some tools like Skyfonts that let you install the top X
| from Google Fonts and it can be a fun way to speed up a
| lot of the web; with the tradeoff that not a lot of
| people have the top X installed for useful large versions
| of X and that becomes its own fingerprint for
| surveillance software (testing how long text takes to
| render in an off screen canvas, for instance).
|
| It's been suggested that Browsers or Operating Systems
| choose a useful X value and install the top fonts
| everywhere like they used to install the classic "core
| web fonts".
| dt3ft wrote:
| I am slightly concerned, yes. This is why I chose to host
| the fonts for my 20-things.com sideproject for as long as
| I can afford that luxury.
| saghm wrote:
| > Inconsolata was one of the 20 fonts for the original launch
|
| Am I understanding this correctly to mean that you were part of
| a group that invented this font? Independent of the great work
| you obviously did on everything else, if this is correct, I
| just wanted to give a specific thank you for that! It's been my
| go-to font for my terminal, text editor, monospace font in the
| browser, and even the font my Linux machines use when they boot
| up before launching the GUI for years now.
| raphlinus wrote:
| No, I drew Inconsolata myself, as well as inventing spiral-
| based tools for designing fonts, as an alternative to
| Beziers. I started work on it far in advance of working on
| the "Google Font API" as it was called at launch, so it was
| very natural to include it, along with other great fonts by
| other talented designers.
|
| I'm glad you like the font!
| amelius wrote:
| Curious, have your spiral based tools been
| documented/published somewhere?
| raphlinus wrote:
| Best place is probably my thesis:
| https://levien.com/phd/phd.html . All of the code is
| available under permissive open source license. I've been
| continuing to poke around with this and hope to have a
| newer set of tools before long.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| I currently work on it as well, so happy to pitch in.
| csomar wrote:
| Can you still be tracked if the fonts are delivered from your
| server?
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| No. A font file served from your own server is just like
| any other static asset. (I increasingly tend to do this for
| my sites, as I've found that using FontSquirrel to create
| WOFF/WOFF2 files that contain subsets of fonts and/or
| "collapse" font features -- e.g., stylistic alternates --
| can make for _very_ small, efficient files if the
| subsetting meets your needs.)
| juandazapata wrote:
| Does Google use this to fingerprint and track users across
| different websites?
| [deleted]
| open-source-ux wrote:
| The Google Font FAQ includes the question: _What does using
| the Google Fonts API mean for the privacy of my users?_
|
| > "...your requests for fonts are separate from and do not
| contain any credentials you send to google.com while using
| other Google services that are authenticated, such as
| Gmail."
|
| >"Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file
| requests, and access to this data is kept secure."
|
| https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the
| _...
| McDyver wrote:
| So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be
| tracked without cookies being sent, while "access to the
| data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I lost my
| trust in google a long time ago.
| lwf wrote:
| To answer "track users across different websites", I
| think they pretty clearly say the opposite:
|
| > The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the
| collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is
| needed to serve fonts efficiently.
|
| > When millions of websites all link to the same fonts,
| they are cached after visiting the first website and
| appear instantly on all other subsequently visited sites.
| [...] The result is that website visitors send very few
| requests to Google: We only see 1 CSS request per font
| family, per day, per browser.
|
| I guess, what would you want to see that would assuage
| your concerns, beyond what is written in the FAQ?
| tjoff wrote:
| They do not say the opposite.
|
| Apparently they need to collect and store end-user data
| for serving fonts efficiently. Wonder what that could
| be...
|
| And if that information happens to be enough for further
| tracking then it seems to be fair game!
| saurik wrote:
| Multiple people (I know as my upvote just now didn't even
| get you back in the black) downvoted you (and now me ;P),
| but you are absolutely correct that that quote didn't
| really have anything to do with the question.
| flixic wrote:
| Any estimate when Inter can be expected?
|
| https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1455#event-2995287982
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Re: variable fonts.
|
| What's the rule of thumb on file size ... is 1 variable font
| smaller than 1 normal font? Or is it more like 1 variable font
| is smaller than 3 normal fonts combined (eg bold, italic,
| regular).
| raphlinus wrote:
| A coarse rule of thumb is that each axis doubles the font
| size. So one that has just a weight axis is twice a normal
| font. One with a weight and width axis is four times. So if
| you actually use multiple instances from the design space,
| it's a win.
|
| This is only a rough guide, don't take it as gospel. I'm also
| researching ideas (radial basis function interpolation) to
| make it more sparse for larger numbers of dimensions.
| adventist wrote:
| Thank you for your service!
| mot2ba wrote:
| Cool. I'm curious about how they counted it. Do they have opted-
| out setting?
| mrspeaker wrote:
| I'd like to view web pages as the authors intend them, but I also
| don't want to send details logging to google on every page I
| visit.
|
| Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally
| rather than block the CDN entirely?
| mleonhard wrote:
| For my business website, I downloaded the webfont files and
| host them with the other website assets. Google made it
| difficult to do this. Of course Google made it very easy to
| just use their hosted version and send my users' data to them.
|
| See https://www.cozydate.com/style.css
| Cenk wrote:
| If anyone else wants to do this, a very handy tool exists
| that makes the process quite easy: https://google-webfonts-
| helper.herokuapp.com/fonts
| DannyCooper wrote:
| You could download the fonts to your machine(s). That way they
| will be served locally rather than connecting to
| fonts.googleapis.com
|
| https://fontsplugin.com/how-to-download-google-fonts/
| tim1994 wrote:
| I think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension
| (https://decentraleyes.org) which does this for popular JS
| frameworks. There is already an issue for this:
| https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387
| Lammy wrote:
| I love Decentraleyes but how would they redistribute most web
| fonts without running afoul of their licenses?
| sstangl wrote:
| Download batches on initial extension load, and
| periodically thereafter, and cache them locally?
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(page generated 2020-02-19 23:00 UTC)