3 ms·

Seems like use of fonts isn't the issue, it's the fact they have to be served. Why can't browsers embed more fonts?

striking 11y ago
Fonts cost money to license. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
- unethical_ban 11y ago
  *Some fonts.
- mapt 11y ago
  It may not be in the spirit of the web, but the current state of things is a failure. Less of a failure than 10 years ago, but still a failure. Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a useful thing for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.
  - vacri 11y ago
    A gzipped truetype font is in the order of 100k, though plenty are bigger. 256 of these is ~25MB. Chrome and Firefox are only 45MB to begin with.
- kzrdude 11y ago
  It's supposed to be a decentralized network. Blocking all non-google or non-typekit webfonts is an example of breaking that vision for the web, which is a shame. I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.
_ZeD_ 11y ago
They can have thousand (no, really, they have thousand). But your little snowflake of a font will always be out.
DiabloD3 11y ago
Yeah, honestly, Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, and Safari would all do well if they all included Open Sans and Droid Sans (Google's; Droid Sans is essentially a semi-condensed variant of Open Sans with less glyph coverage), Fira (Mozilla's), Source Sans Pro (Adobe's), and Helvetica Neue (Apple's). Windows (duh), OSX, and (optionally, see your distro) Linux include several Microsoft fonts (such as Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and New Times Roman, among others; Verdana being the closest to Open Sans, Fira, and Source Sans Pro in modern usage), so Microsoft/MSIE, before web fonts even existed, side stepped the need to always download fonts. Using Google Fonts for distribution of web fonts is great and all, but it doesn't always prevent the need for font download, and Google Fonts always includes the local font name just in case you have it. The weird part is, Chrome doesn't seem to include a copy of Open Sans (even though its Google's official font used almost everywhere), and neither does Android (but it does include Droid Sans and/or Roboto, with, I believe, both Droid Sans and Open Sans aliased to Roboto on Android 5.x), and Firefox doesn't include Fira (even though its the official font for FirefoxOS and they're trying to make Firefox itself be an app host like how Chrome is for a subset of Chrome apps (I'm not sure how Chrome apps vs Chromebook apps work here, are they the same thing? Is it a subset that works on both as long as you don't use Chromebook-only APIs?)) Also, why doesn't Microsoft and Mozilla also spawn their own CDNs for font distribution? Google refuses to have Wingdings-type fonts, even though this is the canonical way of doing vector images meant to be paired with text (due to the ease of use and better ways of handling outlines; WOFF2 eats fonts like Font Awesome up; SVG + gzip would never perform like that, 63kb for several billion icons), and their API for producing subsets of fonts would make icon fonts a shitload smaller, and also have a much higher chance of pre-cached icon fonts (just like popular real fonts enjoy).

Fonts cost money to license. http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLicenses=200&licenseAvlType=1 http://www.linotype.com/1308886/Helvetica-family.html?numLic... Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.

unethical_ban 11y ago
*Some fonts.
mapt 11y ago
It may not be in the spirit of the web, but the current state of things is a failure. Less of a failure than 10 years ago, but still a failure. Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a useful thing for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.
- vacri 11y ago
  A gzipped truetype font is in the order of 100k, though plenty are bigger. 256 of these is ~25MB. Chrome and Firefox are only 45MB to begin with.
kzrdude 11y ago
It's supposed to be a decentralized network. Blocking all non-google or non-typekit webfonts is an example of breaking that vision for the web, which is a shame. I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.

_ZeD_ 11y ago

They can have thousand (no, really, they have thousand). But your little snowflake of a font will always be out.

DiabloD3 11y ago

Yeah, honestly, Chrome, Firefox, MSIE, and Safari would all do well if they all included Open Sans and Droid Sans (Google's; Droid Sans is essentially a semi-condensed variant of Open Sans with less glyph coverage), Fira (Mozilla's), Source Sans Pro (Adobe's), and Helvetica Neue (Apple's). Windows (duh), OSX, and (optionally, see your distro) Linux include several Microsoft fonts (such as Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and New Times Roman, among others; Verdana being the closest to Open Sans, Fira, and Source Sans Pro in modern usage), so Microsoft/MSIE, before web fonts even existed, side stepped the need to always download fonts. Using Google Fonts for distribution of web fonts is great and all, but it doesn't always prevent the need for font download, and Google Fonts always includes the local font name just in case you have it. The weird part is, Chrome doesn't seem to include a copy of Open Sans (even though its Google's official font used almost everywhere), and neither does Android (but it does include Droid Sans and/or Roboto, with, I believe, both Droid Sans and Open Sans aliased to Roboto on Android 5.x), and Firefox doesn't include Fira (even though its the official font for FirefoxOS and they're trying to make Firefox itself be an app host like how Chrome is for a subset of Chrome apps (I'm not sure how Chrome apps vs Chromebook apps work here, are they the same thing? Is it a subset that works on both as long as you don't use Chromebook-only APIs?)) Also, why doesn't Microsoft and Mozilla also spawn their own CDNs for font distribution? Google refuses to have Wingdings-type fonts, even though this is the canonical way of doing vector images meant to be paired with text (due to the ease of use and better ways of handling outlines; WOFF2 eats fonts like Font Awesome up; SVG + gzip would never perform like that, 63kb for several billion icons), and their API for producing subsets of fonts would make icon fonts a shitload smaller, and also have a much higher chance of pre-cached icon fonts (just like popular real fonts enjoy).