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This is what you get when you prioritize companies over users. There's no reason websites should even be able to set the font in my browser. If it was just ab
by kerkeslager 4y ago
This is what you get when you prioritize companies over users.
There's no reason websites should even be able to set the font in my browser.
If it was just about websites achieving an acceptable look, you'd see people emulating industry leaders, but that's not what you see. Google, for example, uses Arial on its main page on my browsers at least--that's a font that's available on every browser I know of. If it's acceptable for Google, it seems like it's just acceptable in general.
Instead, the fonts being loaded are about websites achieving their own brand. I've built a lot of web frontends, and every time I get a rebrand contract, the designs I get contain a bunch of fonts.
As a user, I don't give a fuck about your brand. Being able to read your fonts clearly is a much higher priority for me than experiencing your brand. Fundamentally there's no reason at all that sites should be able to decide for me what font I read. I am lucky to have fairly good eyesight and no serious processing disorders, but users who have these issues are seriously negatively effected by sites overriding their browser defaults. And since few projects are given adequate accessibility budget, users are left with no recourse. Overriding a website's fonts with your browser settings doesn't really help, because sites often use pixels and other dimension units that make your site unreadable if you use a different font than what they tested with.
- hbn 4y agoIf you bought a magazine you don't get to choose the fonts either.
- xigoi 4y agoThat's a limitation of the physical medium, not something we should aspire to.
- schwartzworld 4y agoUser defined styles trump those defined in a website stylesheet. You can absolutely insist that all websites use whatever font you want.
- kerkeslager 4y agoAs I said, "Overriding a website's fonts with your browser settings doesn't really help, because sites often use pixels and other dimension units that make your site unreadable if you use a different font than what they tested with." Of course that can also be fixed, but there's only so far you can take this. I have the technical ability to edit CSS, but I don't reasonably have the time to do it for every site I visit.
- chrismorgan 4y agoFirefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. It’ll still load web fonts for Private Use Area code points (icon fonts) and Google’s misbegotten Material Icons with its awful ASCII + ligation technique (see the browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist pref in about:config), but other than that will stick with your preferred fonts. I tried this as a two-week experiment a year ago. I’ve never gone back, it improves the web so much. (Well, actually I also block web font downloading altogether, for no particularly good reason, at the cost of icon fonts and Material Icons breakage, but it doesn’t often matter.)
- badsectoracula 4y agoSame here, my Firefox has disabled "allow pages to use choose their own fonts" for ages. I do use Stylus to override a bunch of fonts/sizes in various sites too.
- kerkeslager 4y agoSure. But this isn't a viable solution for a lot of people.
- chrismorgan 4y agoWhy not? Are you saying “because a lot of people don’t use Firefox”, or because of some problem you perceive in turning off custom fonts?
- yakubin 4y agoOpen chess.com or lichess.org with that checkbox ticked off. You won't be able to play.
- chrismorgan 4y agoThis is completely false. Both use images for the board and pieces, so you can play just fine. Both do use icon fonts for some of their additional controls on the right hand side, but they all have tooltips so that you can identify them even without the icons. Chess.com uses a bad icon font that uses non-PUA code points (e.g. V = New Game, , = Move Back, … = Move Forward, g = Show Hint), so those ones will be broken. lichess.org uses PUA code points (except for “½” for “Offer draw”), so I think that those icons would even be loaded if you weren’t like me in just blocking web fonts outright.