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Should we stop using the Google font service and host on our own?
- tyingq 9y agoTldr: Google says it won't support version pinning for fonts hosted on their CDN. So, if you want to use a Google hosted font, you're stuck with bleeding edge. If that doesn't work for you, you have to find an alternative host. Bleeding edge means things like fairly drastic weight changes.
- hprotagonist 9y agopersonally i block web fonts regardless, particularly on mobile.
- msl09 9y agoI've seen people arguing in favor of this but what's the reason?
- rement 9y agoI do it for bandwidth. Why should I need to download a font when my device already has several on it.
- ordu 9y agoI would rather reframe this question: what is the reason to download fonts? Downloading leads to page rendering lags and to reporting my browsing behaviour to google, while I see no positive effects from those fonts at all. So why I should be interested in downloading them?
- matt4077 9y agoFonts are one of the dimensions of design. If you've ever enjoyed, for example, one of Edward Tufte's books on visualisation ("The quantitative display of data" etc), part of their appeal as excellently crafted books stems from the choice of fonts. The same happens on the web. See, for example The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com https://www.newyorker.com. Obviously everyone is free to block fonts, just like you can block all images or use a text-only browser etc. But to categorically deny even the possibility that well-chosen fonts can enhance the experience for some people seems disingenuous.
- mrob 9y agoThe most legible font is the font you're most used to. If I let designers chose fonts for me then I'll have to read lots of different fonts, instead of just my own favorite. It can only harm my enjoyment of the web.
- omg_ketchup 9y agoBut blocking icon fonts makes the web less usable for you.
- ordu 9y agoAs NoScript does. Or Ghostery. It is problems of web, not mine. I could find another site, if some one does not work properly.
- ordu 9y agoAs for me speed is much more important that any pretty look. I would rather read internet from terminal with monospaced fonts, if it would add speed and do not harm functionality. But there are no browsers that can do it without losing web-sites functionality -- js, a tons of interaction of modern web needs a very complex and slooow tools to render. Maybe it is just me, but I believe that for other users speed is also matters.
- jtbayly 9y agoSpeed, I imagine, both fewer resources to download, saving bandwidth and time and maybe less processing to do for display, too? I'm not sure about the latter, but the former, I've seen for sure. Much quicker text draw without Google fonts on my mobile.
- gkya 9y agoMy reasons: - Bandwidth: I don't want to download your fonts. I already have the ones I like on my computer and I've configured which ones I want to use (basically DejaVu everywhere). - Crappy type: Your thin type with low-contrast colours hurt my eyes. Or slabs with huge contrasts. Or exaggerated serifs. (BTW "you" here is purely rhetorical, not the commenter I'm responding to.)
- etatoby 9y agoI would do this too, if I could reliably tell icon fonts (which are important) from frilly fonts (which I couldn't care less)
- amelius 9y agoWe need a smarter internet that caches content-addressed objects in a CDN dynamically (based on number of users, or age). That would solve the whole font service problem.
- orliesaurus 9y agoCame in to support this sentiment
- megaman22 9y agoOr use normal fonts. I really don't want to have to download your custom fonts.
- fredley 9y agoThen configure your browser not to download them.
- gcb0 9y agoexpect this to be disabled in chrome if enough people do this. just like they disabled every single option to omit referer headers. though referer header is directly tied to their monetization. the font thing is just a good to have to collect some data.
- opmac 9y agoso don't use chrome.
- SippinLean 9y agoI thought you could disable the headers with an extension or simply by running Chrome behind the --no-referers flag. Has this changed?
- CodesInChaos 9y agoThe problem is distinguishing between fonts used for fancy typography and fonts abused as icon libraries.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoIt is not an abuse to use a font to provide icons. What are letters, if not icons, after all! :)
- epicide 9y agoI think the issue is less about philosophy and more about technology. SVG icons are better than icon fonts in pretty much every way. The only example I can think of where an SVG could be considered worse is if the icon is particularly complex. Even then, the only thing that is worse is file size. At that point, a PNG is probably better, anyway.
- LyndsySimon 9y agoIt's been a while since I really cared about this realm, but wasn't the big deal with Google Fonts in the beginning that licensing was almost impossible to deal with as an individual or small company?
- wongarsu 9y agoBuying fonts is somewhat expensive for individuals, and google fonts certainly helped the free font ecosystem as a great aggregator. But serving the fonts directly from google fonts instead of downloading the fonts and serving them yourself has in my opinion always been a bad idea. In any case it's not a licencing problem anymore, fonts published on google fonts have clearly displayed licenses that usually allow a broad range of uses.
- nishs 9y agoI understand that what Google did was shitty. But then again, the Google Fonts service, as far as I can tell, doesn't have an SLA. At this point, complaining that they switched font weights without notice is equivalent to complaining that fonts.google.com servers went down on a critical Black Friday night for your e-commerce site. I guess self-hosting is probably the best solution if you want to more 'control' over what's happening.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- snowpanda 9y ago>We want everyone on the latest versions for caching reasons From a privacy perspective, I'd love to know what the "caching reasons" are. Purely speaking in terms of big data, I think being able to track users across domains by font requests, even those with ad-blockers, would be in Google's best interest. I don't think saving money on bandwidth is Google's primary concern at this point.
- garblegarble 9y ago> I'd love to know what the "caching reasons" are. I'm betting it's about the client having the font already cached for greater performance, not particularly about bandwidth cost to Google.
- matt4077 9y agoYou're going out of your way to paint Google's arguments in the worst, malicious light. Their interest in caching is not to save their own bandwidth costs, but to lower costs and load times for users. Google's efforts in the web performance space are well documented (see lighthouse as one example). The reasoning for "only the latest version" also happens to be the only one that makes sense: having multiple versions of each font drastically reduces the ability of browsers and CDNs to cache, quite obviously. The motive you ascribe to google, namely user tracking, has absolutely no logical connection to the "latest version only" practice: Google's ability to track users would actually be enhanced by versioning, because their servers are only ever contacted for uncached resources.
- kome 9y agoFor me it's a no brainier, and the answer is yes. Or better: use standard fonts in a creative way.
- AndrewStephens 9y agoYes. But not for just the reasons given in the link. When your page uses resources hosted outside your control, you are effectively giving a third-party access to your users. This applies equally to fonts, images from image hosting services, videos from youtube, etc, and especially to Javascript code (including analytics). At best, you are trading some bandwidth savings for allowing a third-party to analyze your traffic patterns and users in return - maybe that sounds like a good trade to you. But at worst, your are allowing a third-party (or the people that buy that third-party years from now) to break your site (removing images, etc) at any time, completely outside your control. That is not even considering malicious intent. Google is probably OK right now, but who knows? TL/DR : Host everything yourself
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoI always wonder how easily "the whole industry" tacitly agreed it's a good thing because of caching. Nowadays nobody sits down and calculates the weights of benefits and disadvantages, most people are just using CDNs because practically everyone else is doing just that.
- AndrewStephens 9y agoThere was probably a time when it did matter, but I believe (without much evidence) that the benefits of CDNs are less now. * Hosting on decently fast machines is a lot cheaper. * Overall bandwidth is increasing * HTTP2 makes serving up resources cheaper and faster even without other changes. Before a page might request 100 resources and the browser would download them 8 at a time due to having a maximum number of connections to a server. * Browsers are getting smarter about loading resources in general * There used to be only a few big Javascript libraries that everyone tended to use (jQuery, etc). So your browser would download them once from the CDN and cache it for multiple sites. These days there are a lot more. Same with fonts. With hundreds of fonts available the chances of your page's fonts being in the cache is small. The only resources that I think might still be worth offloading to a specialized third-party would be video files, which are still too large to be easily hosted.
- MiddleEndian 9y agoWhat is the incentive to have Google host your fonts anyway? It's something that you'd never want to change or update, and something that requires next to no maintenance.
- matt4077 9y agoThe chances of the font already being cached by a first-time visitor is actually quite high for Google Fonts since their use is widespread and they are not versioned.
- MiddleEndian 9y agoInteresting. I wouldn't think ttf files were big enough for that to be an issue.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoHow long before a Google employee snaps from the brazen entitlement of their non-paying users? Aside from that, hell yeah! CDN is penny-wise and pound-foolish for so many reasons. That, and if people had to go back to using their own bandwidth, perhaps websites would go back to being slightly less bloated.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoI didn't know it was entitled to want your font to keep looking similar to when you first used it. That's a pretty basic design ask.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoAre you paying them?
- mynameisvlad 9y agoDoes it somehow matter? They might not be contractually obligated, but that doesn't mean they should be bad actors about it. People just want best practices to be used, nothing more. Versioning is one of those. They released what amounts to a whole new font in the namespace of an existing font; they even called it a "major" update and a "complete redesign". On one of their most used fonts. All people are asking for is that the Montserrat font be reverted back and the new one released as Montserrat v2. They've done it before with major changes to a font, it's not a hard thing to do and there's clearly already policy in place.
- 3131s 9y agoMy approach is to not depend on 3rd party services at all, because I want to be relatively well-assured that whatever I create will still work 10 years later or more without any modifications beyond security updates.
- rootlocus 9y agoHow about browser updates? I'm not sure it's feasible to expect any webpage to look identical 10 years from now without any kind of maintenance.
- jameskegel 9y agoHave you visited the website for Berkshire Hathaway?
- fapjacks 9y agoThat guy davelab6 seems to be exactly the kind of insufferable, pretentious douche I would imagine lording his font-power over people.
- addicted 9y agoThat seems a pretty unnecessary personal attack. And I didn’t see anything unreasonable in his comment. He pointed out the Google policy of only making available the latest version and also suggested that if the user wanted more control including hosting an older version they should self host (which aligns with everyone else’s suggestions).
- jameskegel 9y agoYou've been here long enough to know we don't carry ourselves this way here. If you take issue with what he says then refute it in an academic way; save this garbage for IRC.
- fapjacks 9y agoJust because we don't typically carry ourselves in that manner doesn't mean it's never warranted. It is totally reasonable to expect font data to remain constant, and totally reasonable for people to get mad when it's not. It's a reasonable expectation that this font data will remain constant, and it's totally unreasonable -- totally stupid -- for anyone to make a claim otherwise. Most people do not go shopping for a Google font expecting its attributes to change significantly at some random point in the future. Saying that versioning won't be implemented, that expecting the font data to remain constant is unreasonable, and to go use some other service if they're not happy with this surprise change... It is amateur hour. This "it's a free service" thing is a piss poor argument as well, because Google is hoovering up all your visitor data when serving those fonts. It's not free.
- jhanschoo 9y agoFor some perspective, note that many professional designers subscribe to a paid subscription model CDN like Adobe TypeKit.
- hannob 9y agoYes. I recently had to help a person with a broken wordpress theme. The reason: The theme used a font from a thirdparty host and that host was gone. The fix: Simple, get the font from the Internet Archive and host a copy locally. When you include assets on your webpage from third parties you always have to expect that they change. Avoid it if you can. For fonts this is mostly annoying as you can't control your layout. For Javascript it's outright dangerous: https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/889-Abandoned-Domain-Takeover-as-a-Web-Security-Risk.html https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/889-Abandoned-Domain-Takeove...
- bsimpson 9y agoI'm really disappointed in the tone of those threads. Attacking a maintainer because you disagree with his decision is never OK. Attacking someone who designed and released a font for free because you dislike his redesign reeks of entitlement. Both threads have way too much "you're all horrible people because I dislike your change" and not enough constructive conversation. I'm sure a broken layout resulting from an upstream font change would be pretty frustrating, but with all the name calling, it's hard for me to take the author seriously.
- beejiu 9y agoI particularly liked this comment: "This is not practical for agencies. The sites have shipped, there's no budget for us" I am sure whatever it costs to go back and fix those sites, it is far less than what it would cost to license a commercial font.
- etatoby 9y agoLol that comment. What an entitled douche! If I were a popular font designer, I would change my metrics every once in a while on purpose, just to spite those people.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoSo some webmasters are handing over even more visitor metadata to google's surveillance leviathan just to shave 100k or so off their page load, and the takers of this "deal" are indignant that Google's versioning isn't robust enough? Break out the tiny violins!
- etatoby 9y agoNot some, but all webmasters, if you exclude a small minority of us who understand the deal in the first place and don't like it.
- yosamino 9y agoThe more the way things change ... It's not new knowledge that "Cool URIs don't change" [0], and I sympathize with the desire to not get your rug pulled from under you like that, but the anger > I can't even breathe > completely broke out design seems a bit over the top. If a change in font weight completely breaks a design, instead of just making it look odd or different, then I really don't think that's good design. ... the more they stay the same [0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
- pier25 9y agoTL;DR: Designers making drama over a font weight change nobody but them will notice. It's an inconvenience for sure, but claims about "drastic changes" and "websites looking completely different" are essentially nit picking. Also, if a slight change in font weight breaks your website, your design / HTML / CSS is wrong. The web is elastic.
- Feniks 9y agoThe internet was supposed to be decentralized, no? Now everyone relies on a few big parties. Luckily Google is too big to fail now so it'll be rescued by taxpayers should the shit hit the fan.
- Froyoh 9y agoLOL: "please understand , the left project is for sneakers shop , intended to be bold and stick out , now it looks like it was designed for lingerie shop , sexy and thin."
- etatoby 9y agohttps://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/ https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/ You're welcome. (Not my creation, but I've been using it for every website I have a say on.)
- krsdcbl 9y agoAs a designer I must disagree with some of the arguments posted - the end user might not see a "difference", but ultimately he will have another experience - he just doenst know how it was supposed to look. Typography is crucial to the appearance of a brand and to the voice of their communication, so having a font in a cdn change all it's weights that drastically _is_ a major problem for designs using it. That said, as a programmer I can't disagree more with how the issue is raised and the tone towards the maintainers - and absolutely agree with them. If you want to be sure that your assets will stay the same, point to a definite version of it that you have control of! If you do work for a client and CI compliance is important, license (!) and host those fonts. Complaining to the author for changing his product is really far off when you've been using a free offer in the first place.
- featherverse 9y agoWhy would anyone ever think they should link to off-site resources? My guess is their only real experience with the web is a few years in college.