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Google Fonts Analytics
- boarnoah 7y agoIt 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 7y agoDesktop Linux is a rounding error
- jsnell 7y agoThe OS table has entry for X11 with maybe 2-3% shaer; I'd bet that's desktop Linux.
- Symbiote 7y agoThat's an impressive figure. Macintosh (desktop Mac?) is slightly less than double the X11 figure. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share has Linux usage at just under 1%.
- half-kh-hacker 7y agoI 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.
- londons_explore 7y agoLots of "browse the web from this phone box" and "the departures board in the train station that shows a webpage" will be Linux. I bet many of them use Google Fonts, and with them auto-refreshing every 5 seconds all day long, they might get seriously overcounted.
- jsnell 7y agoI doubt that the fonts get reloaded when the page is refreshed. According to other posts in this thread, the cache TTL is 24 hours.
- londons_explore 7y agoMost of these boards use kill -9 to restart the browser every half hour or so, and likely nuke the cache each time.
- cronix 7y agoYeah, 36 trillion requests slowing down the loading of websites. Way, unnecessarily, overused.
- irrationalactor 7y agoThe sterile world you desire is not one I'd like to live in.
- Waterluvian 7y agoIt'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.
- paulmendoza 7y agoIf 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.
- jsw 7y agoThat sweet, sweet traffic data.
- trillic 7y agoThe 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 7y agoLast 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 7y agoLoading 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.
- ckdarby 7y agoHow to track everyone, everywhere.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- basilgohar 7y agoPretty 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.
- m463 7y agodecentraleyes plugin, although I wish there was an easy way to add local sources
- sbr464 7y agoGet 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
- jjeaff 7y agoWow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would cost you more than $1 Billion USD.
- ignoramous 7y agoCurious, 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 7y agoHetzner bandwidth was 2 euro per TB last I checked :) Edit. It's now apparently 1 euro /tb without vat
- paxys 7y agoGot 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.
- kevindong 7y agoI'm getting ~$130 million with these assumptions: * each font load is 170 KB (I downloaded Roboto and that's the file size of one weight) * 36.3 trillion font loads (per the source) * 36.3 trillion * 170 KB/font load = ~6171 PB [0] Plug 6171 PB into the GCP calculator [0] with all egress via GCP Cloud CDN to N. America and the bill comes out to just shy of $130 million. OP is off by an order of magnitude by my napkin math, but it's closer than I was expecting. [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB&oq=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB... [1]: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c48-4179-9d63-5c67c6c63ed1 https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c4...
- paxys 7y agoI assumed 22 kb (compressed) font size. That's the average of the top 10 on their list. (Roboto is 35kb uncompressed for me, not 170kb).
- smaili 7y agoDoes 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?
- rememberlenny 7y agoIt does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.
- partiallypro 7y agoThey likely do get some data from it, their own analytics page has data they pull from it.
- skosch 7y agoTheir 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 7y ago> 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 7y agoThe 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
- rococode 7y agoAnyone 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.
- raphlinus 7y agoI 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 7y agoWas this created in order to track users across different sites or because google wanted to make the world a better place? :)
- raphlinus 7y agoThe latter.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoDo you think it's still used for the latter rather than the former now?
- raphlinus 7y agoHeh, 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 7y agoThanks for this honest answer.
- OrgNet 7y agoeither way, loading fonts from google for every website is a stupid idea... it is why an extension like decentraleyes is a good idea (because most website don't think about the consequences).
- mrspeaker 7y agoI'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?
- tim1994 7y agoI think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension (https://decentraleyes.org 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 https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387
- DannyCooper 7y agoYou 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/ https://fontsplugin.com/how-to-download-google-fonts/
- mleonhard 7y agoFor 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 https://www.cozydate.com/style.css
- perardi 7y agoIn 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/typography/variable-fonts 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/optimizing-content-efficiency/webfont-optimization https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o... (More room for ad tracking scripts instead!)
- crazygringo 7y agoOh wow, what's old is new again. I remember when Adobe launched Multiple Master fonts [1] in 1992 (same concept)... and then killed them in 1999 because not enough people were using them. I'll be fascinated to see if there's actually demand for it this time around. I personally have had tons of times I've wanted a semibold where none existed, or something halfway between regular and condensed. But I'm not convinced they're going to save bandwidth for most sites. After all, they incorporate two sets of font outlines along each dimension instead of one, right? And you rarely see a webpage that uses three variations of a font along a single dimension (e.g. sans-serif regular, semibold and bold). A "third" font and beyond is more often a different style (italics) or typeface (serif) entirely. So I don't see the savings in most cases... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
- sings 7y agoI agree variable fonts won't be some magic bullet for file size, but I suppose cached versions of variable fonts means two different sites could use different axis values and the user would only have to download it the first time round. So different sites can more specifically tailor font rendering based on their own needs at no extra cost to the user.
- jcheng 7y agoAs I understand it, Type 1 multiple master was simply superseded by OpenType variable fonts back in the 90s, which is all that Google link is describing. As a user it was a relief to have, afaict, all of the features of Type 1 with all of the convenience of TrueType.
- keriati1 7y agoHow much data traffic could google save if it would just bundle all fonts with chrome?
- thrownaway954 7y agohow much space would packing all those fonts take up?
- LukeBMM 7y agoWith some extra metadata, about 428MB. https://github.com/google/fonts 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 7y agoYou 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.
- thrownaway954 7y agothat to me is the real reason behind this service. it might not make money, but the statistics and insight they get are worth way more than money.
- basilgohar 7y agoYeah, let's just install the Internet Archive on everyone's computer and be done with it. </snark>
- leahcim 7y agoI'm surprised that Linux is the most popular client for this.
- skosch 7y agoThat's probably because Android isn't listed separately.
- vincengomes 7y agoInterestingly iPhone and iPad are listed separately.
- tmnvix 7y agoI'm guessing that's android.
- iamdual 7y agoMost of the crawler bots also mentions Linux in its user agent.
- jimsmart 7y agoI don't think many crawlers will be downloading fonts though?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 7y agoIt's long past time for p2p networks to make this number meaningless / unknowable!
- thrownaway954 7y agoit should link to the font so we can see them
- thrownaway954 7y agoGranted my own wish :) https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity
- aloer 7y agoThe 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_computer_vendors 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_supported https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_su...) Any ideas?
- themacguffinman 7y agoI 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.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoWindows 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.
- humblebee 7y agoWhat 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 7y agoGoogle Search App. The app called "Google" on Android and iOS.
- Bedon292 7y agoMight 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 7y ago200 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 7y agoIt 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 7y agoAt 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.
- pietrasagh 7y agoIn my "humble" oppinion only three most significant (decimal) digts count if you are looking at growth.
- daveslash 7y ago[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.
- londons_explore 7y agoHighlighting text and scrolling is broken too.
- mot2ba 7y agoCool. I'm curious about how they counted it. Do they have opted-out setting?
- londons_explore 7y agoNumber of hits on the web server.
- spectramax 7y agoCan someone provide insight into why Google is hosting fonts for free? Anytime an advertisement company decides to do something for free, my cynicism goes on high alert. I am genuinely curious though - what's the business model? Are they collecting massive amounts of data while offering fonts?
- 3pt14159 7y agoThe reason I self-host fonts (that I paid for) on my personal website is that I don't want third party tracking via fonts on my website. It's all first party and I want to keep it that way. So there is your answer: It's an easy way to track websites via another vector other than Google Analytics, which many people block or which is not installed everywhere.
- jhalstead 7y agoraphlinus had this to say in response to a similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370494
- Animats 7y agoWhy are people still bothering with Google fonts? They were useful when font formats hadn't been standardized, and you needed WOFF, TTF, and SVG for some Apple products. Now, WOFF works everywhere, and you can offer WOFF2, which is compressed more. So why not just put the fonts on your own site and avoid a side trip to Google?
- onion2k 7y agoGoogle Fonts is free. Buying a licence to use a font on the web can be expensive. Also, Google Fonts does more than just delivering a font to the browser - the text= and font subset features can reduce the download size a lot, which you couldn't do if you were serving the Woff2 yourself on a dynamic site (eg you didn't know what characters were needed before the page rendered on the server or client). Lastly,for common fonts like Roboto and Open Sans, there's a non-zero chance it'll already be in the user's cache. That's a win.
- earthboundkid 7y agoLobster is the new Comic Sans.
- tolmasky 7y agoThe way google tracks fonts is so annoying. It took me furever to track down this bug: https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345 https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345 Basically, one out of a thousand requests delivers a broken font that breaks document.fonts.load().
- dwg 7y agoAmazing! And a great link to add to the resume of those designers!
- zzo38computer 7y agoWell, I have disabled web fonts on my computer when I initially configured it.
- 1023bytes 7y agoSo much wasted bandwidth
- totaldude87 7y agoThe top OS for the year is - Linux (15.3T) and i dont know how to interpret this.. Is this due to the web server?
- farmerbb 7y agoThe vast majority of those clients are probably Android