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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 br
by _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 agoWhich 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 agoAt 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.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoIf they didn’t do this you (or someone with similar attitudes) would be complaining that cross site caching allows fingerprinting and violates privacy (which is almost certainly why they did do this).
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoYeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable
- eyelidlessness 6y agoAnd then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).
- coliveira 6y agoBut this is exactly the nature of the problem: a company that has basically the power of big government dictating what people will do without their previous approval. The very existence of such a company is anti-democratic. Now we are stuck with a single company dominating a public service (internet) that affects the lives of billions of people around the world and we don't have a say on how they manage this network.
- geofft 6y agoNo, the nature of the problem is that Google (and big government, in its own ways) is trying to solve hard problems with no good solution. There are clear downsides (described in this thread) to all the possible options, and even the option of letting people choose between bad options doesn't actually make people's lives better at the end of the day. Keep in mind that Chrome basically pioneered the concept of doing OS-level sandboxing between websites. We can complain all we want about how Google should give people the option to choose whether they want hard site isolation or not, but if it weren't for Google's investment in Chrome, we wouldn't even think of the option. Would it be better to live in a world where hard problems don't get possible solutions at all, where no one feels like they have choices taken away from them because the choices were never given them in the first place? (I do firmly agree that the very existence of Google is anti-democratic, though... but I get there via an entirely different argument. I'm glad to see more people concluding this, nonetheless.)
- coliveira 6y agoThe secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live. As for technology existing only because of Google or some other large company, that's not the case. Google was more innovative when it was smaller. Netscape created the whole browser industry as a small startup. Just let a lot of small to medium size companies compete in the market and split the ones that become so big as to become a threat to the whole ecosystem.
- ashtonkem 6y agoTo a first order approximation, nobody actually changes any of these advanced settings. The default is what most people use, and most settings might as well never exist.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoSure, but the people that do change get these settings are people too, and they’re often the type of people that will be vocal about your product and recommend it to people.
- geofft 6y agoThen why haven't any of those vocal people managed to get Firefox, KDE, or Devuan to nontrivial market share?
- ashtonkem 6y ago1) “There is a setting” is a good way to deflect from the more difficult job of making decisions about what the product should do. 2) Every setting comes with an opportunity cost. More than one product has died under a morasse of way too many configuration flags, or focused on features to please a minority of users at the cost of the product itself. 3) The group that says they want the setting is always bigger than the group that will actually use the setting.
- tinus_hn 6y agoIt doesn’t matter because the vast majority won’t change the default so sites won’t optimize for your use case anyway.
- gumby 6y agoMost people don't understand how various options should be set if they even know those options exist.
- athenot 6y agoIf that's true, then it seems like moat-buidling since Google most certainly engages in user fingerprinting for their own ad platform.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoThis is exactly the type of damned if you do damned if you don't carping that GP was calling out.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoExcept we give government a monopoly on things like nuclear weapons...
- gumby 6y agoThe same argument applies to developers not using the state of the art computers packed with RAM. These problems can't be found in QA: if they even show up at all it's too late. Sure, their code will compile faster but they won't get a feel for how it behaves in the real world. Probably the best is to have fast build servers on the LAN while typing at pedestrian machines.
- bee_rider 6y agoWhatever excuses we want to make for forcing web devs to use old netbooks from 2004, I'm down with it (everyone knows they think they're cooler than us, we need to knock them down a notch). Usability? Cool yes that sounds very important or whatever.
- gumby 6y agoI am a software developer; why would I want to "take myself down a peg"? Also I doubt there are many people reading the web on 2004 netbooks. You know what I am talking about.
- LukeShu 6y ago1. I believe the parent post was referring to non-web-developers taking web-developers down a peg, not anyone taking themselves down a peg. 2. I used a small 2007 laptop well in to 2018, and I believe that the software I wrote was better for it.
- gumby 6y agoI must have missed the tweet where web developers were declared cooler than other developers — or was the other way around? I can’t even fathom who is being impugned here, though clearly somebody is quite upset.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoIt's exactly what I've been doing, give or take a few years. I also take the time to boot up my Win95 VM and test in IE3, Netscape in Wine, Lynx, w3m, and many others, with and without JS. The result is designs I can actually be proud of, not ashamed. Of course, no one is paying me for it. And that's OK. I'd rather be doing this for frew than getting six figures working on advertising bullshit which will be gone tomorrow.
- ape4 6y agoYou'd think there should be some technical solution to avoid the privacy issues of this. Eg make it always take one second or something.
- throwaway894345 6y agoThe whole point of caching in the first place is to make things take less time when possible. That would be a strictly worse solution than self-hosting if performance is your most important outcome.
- ape4 6y agoPerhaps a very limited set of response times. Increments of 1/10 of second.
- throwaway894345 6y agoThat's only slightly better--an "attacker" (tracker?) still knows that everything except the longest response times are cache hits.
- tux1968 6y agoGoogle could at least globally cache all the fonts when Chrome is installed; a one time download which is then available for use on all sites. If they licensed other browsers to do the same, the number of fonts available to designers would be large without the performance hit.
- benmanns 6y agoAfaik the license terms may already allow this for most or all of the fonts.
- mthoms 6y agoGood idea, except that the purpose of Google fonts (from Google's perspective) is to provide another means of tracking what sites people are visiting. Maybe a browser extension can do this though.
- dredmorbius 6y agoHanlon's Handgun strikes again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282
- d1zzy 6y agoThat's a bold assertion, care to back that up?
- colejohnson66 6y agoI can’t see it as being true because Chrome already knows what sites you visit. Bundling the fonts wouldn’t change that.
- mthoms 6y agoGoogle claims to not associate the data with particular users (it's anonymized), but there's nothing to stop it from using the data to know how popular certain sites or pages are, what region(s) visitors are coming from, and what user agents (browsers) are being used. And so on. Let me ask you a similar question. Is there any evidence whatsoever that Google built this service out of the goodness of their hearts, and have no intent of using it to gain any sort of competitive advantage? And if you do believe that, is there any evidence that Google will continue to spend millions of dollars supporting a service that gives them zero benefit? What does their track record say about that? For the record, I'm not anti-Google, nor ultra privacy focused. I just think it's common sense that Google expects some sort of ROI here. To many, using Google fonts is considered a fair exchange (especially given that their data is anonymized) and I think that's a perfectly reasonable position. But make no mistake, there is a clear benefit to Google here.
- rovr138 6y agoI’ll add this isn’t just Chrome.
- pkaye 6y agoSeems like then Google should include most of those fonts as part of the browser updates. Or even the top 90% seen.