4 ms·

Google web fonts were a great way to make my site slower. I don’t know if it’s the latency here in Australia or what, but (especially for developing locally) go

by joppy 7y ago

Google web fonts were a great way to make my site slower. I don’t know if it’s the latency here in Australia or what, but (especially for developing locally) google web fonts were a big headache for having snappy webpages. I took the time one day to produce my own webfont files and self-host those, and the difference in site load speed is like night and day.

inimino 7y ago
And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).
- oefrha 7y ago
  Actually Google Analytics works fine in PRC. Google Fonts also isn’t blocked but I recall it being hit-and-miss in terms of responsiveness when I was working on a website that targeted Chinese audience a few years ago. However, I just tried resolving fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on a Chinese server of mine, and they both resolve to a couple of Beijing IP addresses belonging to AS24424 Beijing Gu Xiang Information Technology Co. Ltd., so it’s probably very much usable now.
  - catherd 7y ago
    Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related. I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.
    - inimino 7y ago
      Yes, any additional domain you request to has a non-negligible chance of killing the entire connection. To GP, noticing that one request works once from a server (not a home or mobile connection) really means nothing. Every ISP has different and constantly changing failure modes.

by joppy 7y ago

inimino 7y ago

And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).

oefrha 7y ago
Actually Google Analytics works fine in PRC. Google Fonts also isn’t blocked but I recall it being hit-and-miss in terms of responsiveness when I was working on a website that targeted Chinese audience a few years ago. However, I just tried resolving fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on a Chinese server of mine, and they both resolve to a couple of Beijing IP addresses belonging to AS24424 Beijing Gu Xiang Information Technology Co. Ltd., so it’s probably very much usable now.
- catherd 7y ago
  Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related. I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Yes, any additional domain you request to has a non-negligible chance of killing the entire connection. To GP, noticing that one request works once from a server (not a home or mobile connection) really means nothing. Every ISP has different and constantly changing failure modes.