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I'm usually the first one to sneer in disbelief at super users who 'go nuclear' and disable the likes of javascript and images when browsing the web, but lately

I'm usually the first one to sneer in disbelief at super users who 'go nuclear' and disable the likes of javascript and images when browsing the web, but lately, I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?). The only issues I've come across so far is when a site uses font symbols, but overall, I've been pleasantly surprised.

dm319 6y ago
Have you tried something like uMatrix? If you use it in the denylisting mode, it doesn't seem to impact much on my web browsing experience. By default it is in allowlist mode, which means it's speedy to open pages, but you run into trouble quite quickly. I really can't stand browsing the web without it.
- ce4 6y ago
  What is the maintenance status of uMatrix? I haven't checked recently, my most up to date info is that Gorhill left it due to too many bogus issues filed on Github.
  - bmn__ 6y ago
    Just use uBlock Origin. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-remote-fonts https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
    - Tanath 6y ago
      Not nearly as good.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    It works, I assume there would be forks if needed.
frereubu 6y ago
The "cleaner" feel may well be to do with better font rendering for desktop fonts, because you'll be using something like TTF rather than WOFF. Web font files have to trade off file size for quality, which desktop fonts don't have to do.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  That's not it. WOFF is just a container format for OpenType and TrueType fonts with better compression and some metadata. WOFF has nothing to do with rendering. You can achieve the exact same rendering with a WOFF file as you can with TTF; the contents are the same.
  - frereubu 6y ago
    Well, TIL about it being a container. But do they really contain an identical amount of information for font rendering? I'm no font expert, but I do know that you can have more or less information in a font file that affects how it's rendered.
    - p_l 6y ago
      Yes, it's just an Open Type file. The usual omitted stuff is subsetting a bigger font to include only certain glyphs you need, usually you don't mutilate font by removing rendering data from glyphs.
      - jfk13 6y ago
        Yes, it's just a container for the exact same data that an OpenType font holds. On the other hand, it's possible that in the course of deployment, various things may be dropped from the original font resource: not just subsetting (reducing the repertoire of supported characters), but in some cases also OpenType features (e.g. ligatures or contextual forms), and in some cases hinting is stripped. If that is done, the webfont version may indeed appear differently than the original "desktop" font, depending on local font-rendering settings.
robin_reala 6y ago
If you want a really fast web experience, try disabling images and javascript too! (on rereading this I sounded sarcastic, but I really wasn’t trying to be)
- _a1_ 6y ago
  I'm using uMatrix and by default all javascripts are blacklisted until I explicitly enable it for the site. The downside of this is that lots of websites are broken, payment sites are non-functional, but after a week of building the whitelist, the web is somehow usable again.
  - sekh60 6y ago
    I do the same. What a sad state the web is such that it is completely worth it to spend a week or two building a whitelist just to make it palatable.
  - ce4 6y ago
    I'm in the same boat (mobile + desktop), and agree. One needs to overcome the initial setup of the 80% most used sites. When that is done you get way less tweaking uMatrix. Improves speed, responsiveness, privacy, data usage and battery drain for me on my mobile. For quick one off article reads i load the page in Firefox Focus.
  - sneak 6y ago
    The worst is when the site is totally blank without it, then you enable it, and there's no interactivity: just images and a few words of text. It was totally unnecessary after all.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      That's why I stopped enabling it. Because I've noticed a strong correlation with lack of accessibility and poor quality content I ended up regretting wasting my time reading.
  - Proven 6y ago
captn3m0 6y ago
I've had this as well for quite some time in uBlock Origin - and it works great. Most websites don't need custom fonts, and uBO remembers the ones where I re-enable them back.
scrollaway 6y ago
Web fonts are a big one in terms of making various websites feel fast because, when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint. With that said, they're a fantastic feature but are also way overused. You don't need web fonts unless your website is either heavily type-centric, or has font-related dependencies (such as embedded content of some kind). Icon fonts are also a neat use of web fonts, but they don't make the page "feel slow" when their rendering is slow, because icons loading slower affects our perception of a page's loading time less than its text.
- frereubu 6y ago
  In my experience it's not about a website being "heavily web-centric" (which I'm not sure I understand to be honest - surely websites are by definition "web-centric"?) it's more about being able to match brand fonts. If sites didn't do that they'd end up feeling pretty weird because the crossover of installed desktop fonts is pretty low: http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html (There used to be a better site with fonts listed by what percentage of Windows and MacOS systems had them installed, but the last time I saw it was a while ago and I can't seem to find it again.)
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    > which I'm not sure I understand to be honest Uh yeah, I lack sleep. I meant type-centric (such as a newspaper).
- strangegecko 6y ago
  > when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint What are you thinking of in terms of "implemented incorrectly", do you happen to have an example?
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    I can't recall without looking into it, but there's a lot of gotchas when implementing web fonts. You have to ensure it's using fallbacks, that it can use them before the target fonts have loaded, that the fallbacks are close to the web font in style, and there's a bunch of CSS tricks you can use so that a repaint doesn't end up reflowing everything.
hcnews 6y ago
How does one do this for chrome/firefox? Google search gives result for the opposite problem.
- test1235 6y ago
  firefox options -> language and appearance -> advanced -> uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above'
  - smt88 6y ago
    Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons? It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...
    - test1235 6y ago
      for me personally, I've only noticed this problem once, but I can't remember which site that was (must be one I don't visit often), but obviously your browsing habits are different to mine. I don't see any disadvantages to giving it a try yourself for a while tho' - it's just a single checkbox setting.
      - smt88 6y ago
        I have tried it with uBlock (not Firefox's native setting), and it breaks a ton of mainstream sites.
    - danielheath 6y ago
      “No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...
      - jfk13 6y ago
        That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.
cblconfederate 6y ago
They are. And it is noticeable on old/slow computers. For example comparing bootstrap 2 (which uses image icons) to bootstrap 3. On the other hand, android has only one system font, Roboto, which kind of necessitates using external fonts
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
As a guy who does this blocking pretty ruthlessly (edit: inc. cookies), I'd like to understand why - I don't take offence at 'sneer', ISWYM but I'd like to understand the other side of the fence. TIA
- test1235 6y ago
  sorry, 'sneer' is probably a bit strong - it's really just a lack of understanding on my part (of your side of the fence). I personally find browsing the internet without javascript or cookies enabled by default to be incredibly frustrating/inconvenient, but I'm sure it's all very subjective, down to your own personal browsing habits.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    Thanks, and I understood the word was used for dramatic effect only. From my POV I too find it frustrating at times, but I'd say much of that comes quite unnecessarily not from JS use, but its abuse, eg. fails to display text unless JS is enabled. HTML is pretty good at that! There's no point me boring you with all the plusses of not using js (just ask) but speed... once a connection is made this http://antirez.com/latest/0 http://antirez.com/latest/0 is pretty much instantaneous. (thanks for your reply)
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    Overcoming frustration regarding ads, performance, nag screen, consent screens, poor design, various hijacking, tracking, clickbait and otherwise poor content is very personal in my experience. Some people even invent new protocols (Gemini comes to mind) to circumvent some of these frustrations.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    I found it frustrating and inconvenient at first. Now when I try to use a browser w/ default Javascript settings I find that I'm even more frustrated than when I started using NoScript. Websites left to their own devices to run arbitrary code on my machine are almost universally terrible to use. Local news sites are, by far, the worst. Lots of sites are terrible though.
markosaric 6y ago
So true! So many sites use those icons/symbols in the nav etc so their sites end up broken without web fonts. Other than that, it feels so much better and faster blocking web fonts.
krageon 6y ago
You'll find that disabling images over 50KB has a similar effect, as does disabling all third-party JS except for a select few CDNs if you're lazy. In the end it's three parts performance to one part online safety.
mhd 6y ago
I did an experiment a few months ago where I just switched of font overrides and set my default font to Comic Sans, at a pretty large default size (and I tend to zoom in a lot, too). It actually was quite pleasant and readable, despite the particular font choice.
- Jorge1o1 6y ago
  Comic sans has a lot of space between letters which tens to make it more readable. It’s one of the reasons it’s so popular with schools and kids.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
For me it was some ubuntu site that used such a crooked font my eyes hurt when I saw it.
robscallsign 6y ago
I live in a rural area with bad internet, and the trend to load all of these external fonts, images and javascript externally over https basically makes the web unusable for us. The overhead of the handshakes required by the https connection greatly increased the page load time, and there is about a 1-in-4 chance of one of them timing out and not loading, so as a result the page doesn't load properly or pauses and stops loading.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place? A CDN basically. I know jQuery and Bootstrap recommend using their CDNs so browsers have the copy in their cache. Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    From TFA: > Since Chrome v86, released October 2020, cross-site resources like fonts can’t be shared on the same CDN anymore. This is due to the partitioned browser cache
    - AstroJetson 6y ago
      Which is one of the many reasons I've stopped the almost hourly updates of Chrome. I feel fo people that have bad bandwidth or poor wireless connections. One of my favorite rants if web builders and more importantly the managers of team that build websites were forced to use a DSL speed level connection daily a lot of the cruft would go away.
      - sslayer 6y ago
        At this point Big Tech is no different than Big Government and just as out of touch with those forced to live with it's decisions.
BasDirks 6y ago
A well-designed web page does not rely on custom fonts, unless it is necessary to render a non-standard script.
- lllr_finger 6y ago
  Tufte would disagree, and at least some consider his thoughts on design to be very solid. Would you be amenable to "A well-designed web page does not need to rely on custom fonts, provided their impact on page load is absolutely minimal"? You can unobtrusively serve up a single font embedded as base64 on a static site - a world of difference from some of these sites that load up 5MB of a UX person's vision off some remote CDN.
swiley 6y ago
I HATED sites that used custom fonts when I lived in the country. There are only two ways loading such a site goes: a) you get to stare at a blank page for a couple minutes while the font downloads, if it downloads at all. (this seemed to be google's favorite way to screw over people with bad connections; acknowledgment that it's going to suck and doing it anyway) b) you get two minutes into reading the page only for everything to suddenly jump somewhere else when it switches to the font. (this seems more like the result of ignorant web designers) JS sucks but webfonts consistently make the web an awful place.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Re: (b): I know there’s a MathJax clone that works around the constant reformatting by precalculating the sizes of the various blocks and putting that into the HTML. So your browser basically makes a big empty placeholder box that the renderer will render into. It’d be neat if something like that were available for web fonts. Each paragraph gets its own “block” that the installed font uses (and contains padding), and when the font downloads, it won’t reflow. But I’d assume it’d be way too complicated to deal with (different screen widths is the first to come to mind).
  - ori_b 6y ago
    It's also likely to be implemented as a ton of JS to download, which would either block rendering (see option 1 above), or apply after the content loaded (see option 2). So, a bunch of work to fix something that isn't broken when you turn off webfonts and respect user settings.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      With an isomorphic web app, that should be calculated server side.
      - ori_b 6y ago
        Using what screen size, page zoom level, and font rendering engine?
eyelidlessness 6y ago
Fonts are large assets (often larger than a full bleed banner image), so they do add to page weight. They also “swap” by default, replacing a local font after loading, which adds to the perceptible load time. There are other techniques that may feel different depending on usage but unfortunately there’s no silver bullet.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
I have most blocked as well through my ad blockers. The biggest annoyance is when they use fonts for icons instead of images. I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious.
- csnover 6y ago
  > I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious. (1) The options for controlling the style of SVG elements (e.g. on hover) are not great.[0] In contrast, font icons can be styled as easily as any other text. (2) Font files are usually smaller than their SVG counterparts. (3) Font rendering is faster than SVG rendering. (4) IE did not support SVG until version 9, but supported custom fonts since version 5. (5) Old browsers that did support SVG had serious issues with SVG sprite maps, ranging from creating duplicate rasterisations of the entire SVG file in memory for every use of the same file in a document, to not caching the rasters at all and regenerating them every time they needed to be repainted (e.g. during scrolling). These are fixed now, but inertia is what it is. [0] https://css-tricks.com/change-color-of-svg-on-hover/ https://css-tricks.com/change-color-of-svg-on-hover/
ardy42 6y ago
> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?). That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. But manual font hinting is super expensive, so web fonts don't do it. If you disable them, I'm sure the system has to fall back to the (higher quality) defaults. Most web fonts are automatically hinted, so they only look acceptable with font smoothing on (at normal font sizes with normal DPIs). If you turn smoothing off, the fonts look super ugly with all kinds of artifacts like weird double-thick lines. I've tried to disable web fonts because I hate font smoothing (to me it's just blurry, not smooth), but the issue I've run into is the fad of using a custom font for icons, so I end up getting lots of unicode tofu for graphics (e.g. https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568 https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568).
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. I'm not too familiar with the details of the icon fonts, but my bet is that most of those characters are in the private use area. I guess it boils down to if an extension can hook into the font-resolution process, to have different resolution policies for different character ranges. I know there are extensions that can block web fonts, but maybe they just prevent the resource from loading at all.
- com2kid 6y ago
getpost 6y ago
> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally How do you do this exactly?
- greggturkington 6y ago
  An easy way is enabling "Block remote fonts" in uBlock Origin's settings You could add a filter like `*$font,third-party` or similar as well
porpoise 6y ago
> and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?) More readable, and also helps one focus on the content. A lot of web publications with literary pretensions (New Yorker, Quillette, LRB …) use pretty classic-looking externally loaded serif fonts for their articles, which not only slows down reading but can also (IMO) make one less critical of the content than one otherwise would be. If I were the editors of these magazines I would be seriously tempted to force the use of Comic Sans for all article content. May not be good from advertising point of view but it signals a kind of intellectual honesty that I suspect is valued higher by their readership than a "classic look"
natchy 6y ago
> having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally) Safari prevents website from using local fonts. Only web fonts. The thought is that a site could check which fonts work for you based on local fonts and use that towards your marketing thumbprint.
greggturkington 6y ago
That's a MAJOR hit to design and branding for a very small hit in page weight. Properly configured webfonts add almost nothing at all. There may be more business value in the 500ms you save vs branding (absolutely possible) but it's a tradeoff.
manicdee 6y ago
My favourites are sites that load the layout, the ads, the analytics, then the fonts and only then the actual text of the page. If the font doesn’t load, the text doesn’t load — and if you have JavaScript turned off just a blank layout with ad-sized blocks waiting for something to happen.
Sunspark 6y ago
I tend to disable page fonts and use my own selection instead because I prefer to have anti-aliasing off. Fonts that were designed before cleartype look great with AA off but cleartype fonts usually look awful with AA off because of the lack of hinting.
- maaarghk 6y ago
  why do you prefer to have anti-aliasing off? what sort of monitor do you use?
  - Sunspark 6y ago
    I have a regular 16:9 monitor, 2048x1152, in which I have Windows font scaling set at 150%. The reason I prefer AA off (with fonts that were designed for it like Verdana or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) is because I find it less tiring on the eyes. With AA off, the edges are all sharp and crisp, there's no blurriness. It looks closer to print. When AA is on, they look smeared and don't have clearly defined edges. What is also a puzzler, as displays become increasingly higher resolution, now 4K and heading toward 8K, the need for AA is supposed to disappear. You don't need to fake smoothness at high pixel resolutions, yet many OSes are actually now making it harder to turn AA off. It gets dumber.. OSes that used RGB subpixel AA (cleartype) because they're now on tablets and other devices that rotate, they can't count on the RGB stripe, so they stopped using RGB subpixel AA and went back to greyscale AA.

dm319 6y ago

Have you tried something like uMatrix? If you use it in the denylisting mode, it doesn't seem to impact much on my web browsing experience. By default it is in allowlist mode, which means it's speedy to open pages, but you run into trouble quite quickly. I really can't stand browsing the web without it.

ce4 6y ago
What is the maintenance status of uMatrix? I haven't checked recently, my most up to date info is that Gorhill left it due to too many bogus issues filed on Github.
- bmn__ 6y ago
  Just use uBlock Origin. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-remote-fonts https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
  - Tanath 6y ago
    Not nearly as good.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  It works, I assume there would be forks if needed.

frereubu 6y ago

The "cleaner" feel may well be to do with better font rendering for desktop fonts, because you'll be using something like TTF rather than WOFF. Web font files have to trade off file size for quality, which desktop fonts don't have to do.

Freak_NL 6y ago
That's not it. WOFF is just a container format for OpenType and TrueType fonts with better compression and some metadata. WOFF has nothing to do with rendering. You can achieve the exact same rendering with a WOFF file as you can with TTF; the contents are the same.
- frereubu 6y ago
  Well, TIL about it being a container. But do they really contain an identical amount of information for font rendering? I'm no font expert, but I do know that you can have more or less information in a font file that affects how it's rendered.
  - p_l 6y ago
    Yes, it's just an Open Type file. The usual omitted stuff is subsetting a bigger font to include only certain glyphs you need, usually you don't mutilate font by removing rendering data from glyphs.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      Yes, it's just a container for the exact same data that an OpenType font holds. On the other hand, it's possible that in the course of deployment, various things may be dropped from the original font resource: not just subsetting (reducing the repertoire of supported characters), but in some cases also OpenType features (e.g. ligatures or contextual forms), and in some cases hinting is stripped. If that is done, the webfont version may indeed appear differently than the original "desktop" font, depending on local font-rendering settings.

robin_reala 6y ago

If you want a really fast web experience, try disabling images and javascript too! (on rereading this I sounded sarcastic, but I really wasn’t trying to be)

_a1_ 6y ago
I'm using uMatrix and by default all javascripts are blacklisted until I explicitly enable it for the site. The downside of this is that lots of websites are broken, payment sites are non-functional, but after a week of building the whitelist, the web is somehow usable again.
- sekh60 6y ago
  I do the same. What a sad state the web is such that it is completely worth it to spend a week or two building a whitelist just to make it palatable.
- ce4 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat (mobile + desktop), and agree. One needs to overcome the initial setup of the 80% most used sites. When that is done you get way less tweaking uMatrix. Improves speed, responsiveness, privacy, data usage and battery drain for me on my mobile. For quick one off article reads i load the page in Firefox Focus.
- sneak 6y ago
  The worst is when the site is totally blank without it, then you enable it, and there's no interactivity: just images and a few words of text. It was totally unnecessary after all.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    That's why I stopped enabling it. Because I've noticed a strong correlation with lack of accessibility and poor quality content I ended up regretting wasting my time reading.
- Proven 6y ago

captn3m0 6y ago

I've had this as well for quite some time in uBlock Origin - and it works great. Most websites don't need custom fonts, and uBO remembers the ones where I re-enable them back.

scrollaway 6y ago

Web fonts are a big one in terms of making various websites feel fast because, when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint. With that said, they're a fantastic feature but are also way overused. You don't need web fonts unless your website is either heavily type-centric, or has font-related dependencies (such as embedded content of some kind). Icon fonts are also a neat use of web fonts, but they don't make the page "feel slow" when their rendering is slow, because icons loading slower affects our perception of a page's loading time less than its text.

frereubu 6y ago
In my experience it's not about a website being "heavily web-centric" (which I'm not sure I understand to be honest - surely websites are by definition "web-centric"?) it's more about being able to match brand fonts. If sites didn't do that they'd end up feeling pretty weird because the crossover of installed desktop fonts is pretty low: http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html (There used to be a better site with fonts listed by what percentage of Windows and MacOS systems had them installed, but the last time I saw it was a while ago and I can't seem to find it again.)
- scrollaway 6y ago
  > which I'm not sure I understand to be honest Uh yeah, I lack sleep. I meant type-centric (such as a newspaper).
strangegecko 6y ago
> when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint What are you thinking of in terms of "implemented incorrectly", do you happen to have an example?
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I can't recall without looking into it, but there's a lot of gotchas when implementing web fonts. You have to ensure it's using fallbacks, that it can use them before the target fonts have loaded, that the fallbacks are close to the web font in style, and there's a bunch of CSS tricks you can use so that a repaint doesn't end up reflowing everything.

hcnews 6y ago

How does one do this for chrome/firefox? Google search gives result for the opposite problem.

test1235 6y ago
firefox options -> language and appearance -> advanced -> uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above'
- smt88 6y ago
  Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons? It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...
  - test1235 6y ago
    for me personally, I've only noticed this problem once, but I can't remember which site that was (must be one I don't visit often), but obviously your browsing habits are different to mine. I don't see any disadvantages to giving it a try yourself for a while tho' - it's just a single checkbox setting.
    - smt88 6y ago
      I have tried it with uBlock (not Firefox's native setting), and it breaks a ton of mainstream sites.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    “No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...
    - jfk13 6y ago
      That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.

cblconfederate 6y ago

They are. And it is noticeable on old/slow computers. For example comparing bootstrap 2 (which uses image icons) to bootstrap 3. On the other hand, android has only one system font, Roboto, which kind of necessitates using external fonts

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

As a guy who does this blocking pretty ruthlessly (edit: inc. cookies), I'd like to understand why - I don't take offence at 'sneer', ISWYM but I'd like to understand the other side of the fence. TIA

test1235 6y ago
sorry, 'sneer' is probably a bit strong - it's really just a lack of understanding on my part (of your side of the fence). I personally find browsing the internet without javascript or cookies enabled by default to be incredibly frustrating/inconvenient, but I'm sure it's all very subjective, down to your own personal browsing habits.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Thanks, and I understood the word was used for dramatic effect only. From my POV I too find it frustrating at times, but I'd say much of that comes quite unnecessarily not from JS use, but its abuse, eg. fails to display text unless JS is enabled. HTML is pretty good at that! There's no point me boring you with all the plusses of not using js (just ask) but speed... once a connection is made this http://antirez.com/latest/0 http://antirez.com/latest/0 is pretty much instantaneous. (thanks for your reply)
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  Overcoming frustration regarding ads, performance, nag screen, consent screens, poor design, various hijacking, tracking, clickbait and otherwise poor content is very personal in my experience. Some people even invent new protocols (Gemini comes to mind) to circumvent some of these frustrations.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  I found it frustrating and inconvenient at first. Now when I try to use a browser w/ default Javascript settings I find that I'm even more frustrated than when I started using NoScript. Websites left to their own devices to run arbitrary code on my machine are almost universally terrible to use. Local news sites are, by far, the worst. Lots of sites are terrible though.

markosaric 6y ago

So true! So many sites use those icons/symbols in the nav etc so their sites end up broken without web fonts. Other than that, it feels so much better and faster blocking web fonts.

krageon 6y ago

You'll find that disabling images over 50KB has a similar effect, as does disabling all third-party JS except for a select few CDNs if you're lazy. In the end it's three parts performance to one part online safety.

mhd 6y ago

I did an experiment a few months ago where I just switched of font overrides and set my default font to Comic Sans, at a pretty large default size (and I tend to zoom in a lot, too). It actually was quite pleasant and readable, despite the particular font choice.

Jorge1o1 6y ago
Comic sans has a lot of space between letters which tens to make it more readable. It’s one of the reasons it’s so popular with schools and kids.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

For me it was some ubuntu site that used such a crooked font my eyes hurt when I saw it.

robscallsign 6y ago

I live in a rural area with bad internet, and the trend to load all of these external fonts, images and javascript externally over https basically makes the web unusable for us. The overhead of the handshakes required by the https connection greatly increased the page load time, and there is about a 1-in-4 chance of one of them timing out and not loading, so as a result the page doesn't load properly or pauses and stops loading.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place? A CDN basically. I know jQuery and Bootstrap recommend using their CDNs so browsers have the copy in their cache. Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  From TFA: > Since Chrome v86, released October 2020, cross-site resources like fonts can’t be shared on the same CDN anymore. This is due to the partitioned browser cache
  - AstroJetson 6y ago
    Which is one of the many reasons I've stopped the almost hourly updates of Chrome. I feel fo people that have bad bandwidth or poor wireless connections. One of my favorite rants if web builders and more importantly the managers of team that build websites were forced to use a DSL speed level connection daily a lot of the cruft would go away.
    - sslayer 6y ago
      At this point Big Tech is no different than Big Government and just as out of touch with those forced to live with it's decisions.

BasDirks 6y ago

A well-designed web page does not rely on custom fonts, unless it is necessary to render a non-standard script.

lllr_finger 6y ago
Tufte would disagree, and at least some consider his thoughts on design to be very solid. Would you be amenable to "A well-designed web page does not need to rely on custom fonts, provided their impact on page load is absolutely minimal"? You can unobtrusively serve up a single font embedded as base64 on a static site - a world of difference from some of these sites that load up 5MB of a UX person's vision off some remote CDN.

swiley 6y ago

I HATED sites that used custom fonts when I lived in the country. There are only two ways loading such a site goes: a) you get to stare at a blank page for a couple minutes while the font downloads, if it downloads at all. (this seemed to be google's favorite way to screw over people with bad connections; acknowledgment that it's going to suck and doing it anyway) b) you get two minutes into reading the page only for everything to suddenly jump somewhere else when it switches to the font. (this seems more like the result of ignorant web designers) JS sucks but webfonts consistently make the web an awful place.

colejohnson66 6y ago
Re: (b): I know there’s a MathJax clone that works around the constant reformatting by precalculating the sizes of the various blocks and putting that into the HTML. So your browser basically makes a big empty placeholder box that the renderer will render into. It’d be neat if something like that were available for web fonts. Each paragraph gets its own “block” that the installed font uses (and contains padding), and when the font downloads, it won’t reflow. But I’d assume it’d be way too complicated to deal with (different screen widths is the first to come to mind).
- ori_b 6y ago
  It's also likely to be implemented as a ton of JS to download, which would either block rendering (see option 1 above), or apply after the content loaded (see option 2). So, a bunch of work to fix something that isn't broken when you turn off webfonts and respect user settings.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    With an isomorphic web app, that should be calculated server side.
    - ori_b 6y ago
      Using what screen size, page zoom level, and font rendering engine?

eyelidlessness 6y ago

Fonts are large assets (often larger than a full bleed banner image), so they do add to page weight. They also “swap” by default, replacing a local font after loading, which adds to the perceptible load time. There are other techniques that may feel different depending on usage but unfortunately there’s no silver bullet.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

I have most blocked as well through my ad blockers. The biggest annoyance is when they use fonts for icons instead of images. I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious.

csnover 6y ago
> I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious. (1) The options for controlling the style of SVG elements (e.g. on hover) are not great.[0] In contrast, font icons can be styled as easily as any other text. (2) Font files are usually smaller than their SVG counterparts. (3) Font rendering is faster than SVG rendering. (4) IE did not support SVG until version 9, but supported custom fonts since version 5. (5) Old browsers that did support SVG had serious issues with SVG sprite maps, ranging from creating duplicate rasterisations of the entire SVG file in memory for every use of the same file in a document, to not caching the rasters at all and regenerating them every time they needed to be repainted (e.g. during scrolling). These are fixed now, but inertia is what it is. [0] https://css-tricks.com/change-color-of-svg-on-hover/ https://css-tricks.com/change-color-of-svg-on-hover/

ardy42 6y ago

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?). That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. But manual font hinting is super expensive, so web fonts don't do it. If you disable them, I'm sure the system has to fall back to the (higher quality) defaults. Most web fonts are automatically hinted, so they only look acceptable with font smoothing on (at normal font sizes with normal DPIs). If you turn smoothing off, the fonts look super ugly with all kinds of artifacts like weird double-thick lines. I've tried to disable web fonts because I hate font smoothing (to me it's just blurry, not smooth), but the issue I've run into is the fad of using a custom font for icons, so I end up getting lots of unicode tofu for graphics (e.g. https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568 https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568).

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants. I'm not too familiar with the details of the icon fonts, but my bet is that most of those characters are in the private use area. I guess it boils down to if an extension can hook into the font-resolution process, to have different resolution policies for different character ranges. I know there are extensions that can block web fonts, but maybe they just prevent the resource from loading at all.
com2kid 6y ago

getpost 6y ago

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally How do you do this exactly?

greggturkington 6y ago
An easy way is enabling "Block remote fonts" in uBlock Origin's settings You could add a filter like `*$font,third-party` or similar as well

porpoise 6y ago

> and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?) More readable, and also helps one focus on the content. A lot of web publications with literary pretensions (New Yorker, Quillette, LRB …) use pretty classic-looking externally loaded serif fonts for their articles, which not only slows down reading but can also (IMO) make one less critical of the content than one otherwise would be. If I were the editors of these magazines I would be seriously tempted to force the use of Comic Sans for all article content. May not be good from advertising point of view but it signals a kind of intellectual honesty that I suspect is valued higher by their readership than a "classic look"

natchy 6y ago

> having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally) Safari prevents website from using local fonts. Only web fonts. The thought is that a site could check which fonts work for you based on local fonts and use that towards your marketing thumbprint.

greggturkington 6y ago

That's a MAJOR hit to design and branding for a very small hit in page weight. Properly configured webfonts add almost nothing at all. There may be more business value in the 500ms you save vs branding (absolutely possible) but it's a tradeoff.

manicdee 6y ago

My favourites are sites that load the layout, the ads, the analytics, then the fonts and only then the actual text of the page. If the font doesn’t load, the text doesn’t load — and if you have JavaScript turned off just a blank layout with ad-sized blocks waiting for something to happen.

Sunspark 6y ago

I tend to disable page fonts and use my own selection instead because I prefer to have anti-aliasing off. Fonts that were designed before cleartype look great with AA off but cleartype fonts usually look awful with AA off because of the lack of hinting.

maaarghk 6y ago
why do you prefer to have anti-aliasing off? what sort of monitor do you use?
- Sunspark 6y ago
  I have a regular 16:9 monitor, 2048x1152, in which I have Windows font scaling set at 150%. The reason I prefer AA off (with fonts that were designed for it like Verdana or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) is because I find it less tiring on the eyes. With AA off, the edges are all sharp and crisp, there's no blurriness. It looks closer to print. When AA is on, they look smeared and don't have clearly defined edges. What is also a puzzler, as displays become increasingly higher resolution, now 4K and heading toward 8K, the need for AA is supposed to disappear. You don't need to fake smoothness at high pixel resolutions, yet many OSes are actually now making it harder to turn AA off. It gets dumber.. OSes that used RGB subpixel AA (cleartype) because they're now on tablets and other devices that rotate, they can't count on the RGB stripe, so they stopped using RGB subpixel AA and went back to greyscale AA.