4 ms·

I once had to suffer through a tethered 2G internet for a few months, and made an extension to disable web fonts[0] because they felt like a waste of bandwidth.

I once had to suffer through a tethered 2G internet for a few months, and made an extension to disable web fonts[0] because they felt like a waste of bandwidth. Ever since, I've appreciated the "system-fonts" design ethos and tried to stick to that everywhere - most content on the internet doesn't need to choose it's own set of typefaces (almost inevitably from Google Fonts). These days, I keep web fonts disabled using uBlock Origin, and enable them on a need-basis when sites decide to use web fonts as icons. My favorite glitch is Banggood which somehow fallbacks to show me icons for PHP, Java, and Firefox in the navbar [1] because the glyph matches the file-icons system font somehow. [0]: github.com/captn3m0/disable-web-fonts [1]: https://imgur.com/a/k0HG1i5 https://imgur.com/a/k0HG1i5

rob74 5y ago
..."almost inevitably from Google Analyt... err, Fonts"
ximm 5y ago
Firefox has a setting "allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" (browser.display.use_document_fonts). I like how this wording considers user-defined fonts the default.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  I've found that setting to be very aggressive, breaking too much of emoji/indic content for me.
  - saghm 5y ago
    I had this problem when putting Into Sans as my font until I realized that I needed to install a separate package on my distro for the emoji set for that font. I'm guessing that this setting just doesn't allow fallback to another font if the one that you selected doesn't have emojis in it, which sort of makes sense but realistically is bad UX; there should be a way to say "use my preferred font whenever possible" without saying "just give up if my preferred font doesn't support a given character". I guess the implementation might be tricky due to the fact that whether a given substring even renders as a single character or not (I might be using the word "character" incorrectly here; I know there's a lot of vernacular here).

rob74 5y ago

..."almost inevitably from Google Analyt... err, Fonts"

ximm 5y ago

Firefox has a setting "allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" (browser.display.use_document_fonts). I like how this wording considers user-defined fonts the default.

captn3m0 5y ago
I've found that setting to be very aggressive, breaking too much of emoji/indic content for me.
- saghm 5y ago
  I had this problem when putting Into Sans as my font until I realized that I needed to install a separate package on my distro for the emoji set for that font. I'm guessing that this setting just doesn't allow fallback to another font if the one that you selected doesn't have emojis in it, which sort of makes sense but realistically is bad UX; there should be a way to say "use my preferred font whenever possible" without saying "just give up if my preferred font doesn't support a given character". I guess the implementation might be tricky due to the fact that whether a given substring even renders as a single character or not (I might be using the word "character" incorrectly here; I know there's a lot of vernacular here).