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Question from a non web developer: Wouldn’t it make more sense to bundle a large amount of fonts with Google Chrome itself? For instance when you install the br

Question from a non web developer: Wouldn’t it make more sense to bundle a large amount of fonts with Google Chrome itself? For instance when you install the browser and its updates you also install something like the top 100 most used web fonts on your machine. Would this be a viable thing to do?

sgbeal 4y ago
> Wouldn’t it make more sense to bundle a large amount of fonts with Google Chrome itself? Browser-specific features are what got the world in such a mess being tied to MSIE 6 for so long. i can't count how many times i heard "we have to use MSIE because it's the only browser which supports X" the first decade of this century. (Where "X" was normally "COM", which was frequently used in Enterprise-level web apps.) The fewer browser-specific content-side capabilities (as opposed to non-web-page capabilities) there are in browsers, the better it is for the world.
dspillett 4y ago
> Would this be a viable thing to do? Yes, ish. So not really. If you add them all to the OS font store then all those fonts are available to other applications (probably good) but this may be an inconvenience to a lot of users by making it hard to find the few fonts they actually do use for other work (almost certainly bad). If you don't add then to the OS font store then they only work with your browser. Also, even if you did add them to the OS font store, it still doesn't work on other browsers unless they also have yours installed. Also 100 fonts in a range of sub-styles (italic/not at least) and weights (at least bold/not) could be an extra 100Mb of stuff that you are adding to your installer and application footprint (potentially significant on small devices like non-flagship phones) which may be very rarely used (the majority of sites don't use Google Fonts). Furthermore, how do you pick the 100? Is that enough to cover enough cases to actually be useful? A site using specific fonts is likely to want something really specific and there are approaching 1,500 options on Google Fonts, so the top 100 might not cover a significant proportion of sites using the service. The point of web font loading is that a site can use what it wants without having to worry about whether it is already available on any given client device or not.

sgbeal 4y ago

> Wouldn’t it make more sense to bundle a large amount of fonts with Google Chrome itself? Browser-specific features are what got the world in such a mess being tied to MSIE 6 for so long. i can't count how many times i heard "we have to use MSIE because it's the only browser which supports X" the first decade of this century. (Where "X" was normally "COM", which was frequently used in Enterprise-level web apps.) The fewer browser-specific content-side capabilities (as opposed to non-web-page capabilities) there are in browsers, the better it is for the world.

dspillett 4y ago

> Would this be a viable thing to do? Yes, ish. So not really. If you add them all to the OS font store then all those fonts are available to other applications (probably good) but this may be an inconvenience to a lot of users by making it hard to find the few fonts they actually do use for other work (almost certainly bad). If you don't add then to the OS font store then they only work with your browser. Also, even if you did add them to the OS font store, it still doesn't work on other browsers unless they also have yours installed. Also 100 fonts in a range of sub-styles (italic/not at least) and weights (at least bold/not) could be an extra 100Mb of stuff that you are adding to your installer and application footprint (potentially significant on small devices like non-flagship phones) which may be very rarely used (the majority of sites don't use Google Fonts). Furthermore, how do you pick the 100? Is that enough to cover enough cases to actually be useful? A site using specific fonts is likely to want something really specific and there are approaching 1,500 options on Google Fonts, so the top 100 might not cover a significant proportion of sites using the service. The point of web font loading is that a site can use what it wants without having to worry about whether it is already available on any given client device or not.