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Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.
by eps 13y ago
Trillion visits logged.
Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.
- untog 13y agoYep, like everything, it's a trade off. In return you get a very robust platform and free fonts.
- pandringa 13y agoIn return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.
- ars_technician 13y agoLogged visits to sites they would otherwise not get. Font request+referrer is useful information.
- Silhouette 13y agoIf you're concerned about your own privacy in this respect, you can install a plug-in for most browsers that will prevent a real Referer being sent with your requests. Google will still serve you the web font, they just won't know which page you were viewing at the time. (I'm not making any comment on Google's general strategy or how many people would actually understand that they might wish to protect their privacy in this way, just pointing out that it can be done.)
- J_Darnley 13y agoMy computer or more accurately the operating system came with dozens of fonts, maybe hundreds. Why can't you use one of those?
- jonknee 13y agoBecause most of them suck?
- SquareWheel 13y agoAnd more than that, each operating system has a different set of fonts.
- xnxn 13y agoImagine how ridiculous the web would look today if content creators had to restrict the images they used to some common subset of those preinstalled on clients' operating systems. Would you condemn web typography to the use of "web safe fonts" forever?
- J_Darnley 13y agoYes. I do indeed condemn creators to use a font which renders correctly and I also condemn them to use a size which is legible.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoIsn't it the job of the user agent to have options to override the choices of a website? Otherwise, the subset of "fonts everybody is sure to have" is just too small. Why not let everybody have websites look how they want them to look? I'm kinda sad this vision gets so little attention, that instead we all try to push our vision on our visitors. Even if the web turns app platform.. just like we have configurable desktop managers, browser could still let everybody customize how websites look - if only websites could stop with the "story telling" and "experiences", and concentrated on utility and information. We're too addicted too shiny for our own good already.
- gress 13y agoA trade off implies people understand what Google is doing, which they don't because it's secret.
- unknownian 13y agoIs it against the TOS to download the font and host it on your own server? It's very simple to do even though they don't give instructions.
- jonknee 13y agoNo: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts
- putlake 13y agoI am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads). Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M Google Fonts makes a lot of optimizations that are platform-specific. e.g. serve smaller files to Macs, larger files to Windows. It is not worth doing all this yourself.
- markdown 13y agoDon't put anything more than 10KB into a CSS file as a data URI.
- Silhouette 13y agoWhere does this limit come from? IE8 can handle up to 32KB[1], and more recent versions of all major browsers appear to have much higher limits. IE7 and below didn't support data: anyway. [1] See http://caniuse.com/datauri http://caniuse.com/datauri, and confirmed by Microsoft's own technical documentation.
- markdown 13y agoOh I didn't mean that to be a browser limitation, but that it is generally a good idea performance wise.
- afsina 13y agoSo you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.
- RexRollman 13y agoThey are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.
- jfb 13y agoI personally think that Google does things like this because they can; they are not under money pressure (yet?) to have to really try to extract maximum value from every bit served or watt consumed, and can thus spend energy on initiatives like this that improve the web as a platform -- it's at best an indirect benefit, but fits their overall corporate strategy. And, it's cool. I have my doubts about Google, but I don't have a problem giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
- garthdog 13y agoMake the web better for all forms of content so that people don't resort to proprietary tech?
- ChrisArchitect 13y agosure, advertising. but the goal here is to make the web more user friendly and useful for people, through better looking design/readability etc. That helps us all, and if then in turn they can keep the ad platforms alive, good on them I say.
- DannyBee 13y agoThe motivations, as far as i know, are written on the about page: "A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. " Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications." If you have some actual evidence that the last part isn't true, and that it's really some big scheme to "log visits", what is it, exactly? FWIW - my dealings with the team, which mostly involve reviewing occasional open source font contracts, makes me believe they really are just crazy about making web typography good. But i'm really interested in whatever sinister theories people have. I mean, you know what they say about people who like "Signika Negative".
- jonknee 13y agoExcept the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source): https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts > You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server. Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move that along. Update: No cookies are set by Google either, they're just doing analytics by the user agent sent. The actual font files have 1 year expires headers on them as well, so cookies would be of limited use.
- loceng 13y agoDidn't realize this - thanks. :)
- mehrdada 13y agoAlso, without accessible web fonts, developers will have to use images containing rendered texts to get text pretty on their web pages, which is not so easy to index for a search engine.
- gress 13y agoExcept for the fact that people don't download and serve them themselves.
- eps 13y ago> Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself. Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.
- notJim 13y agoHere you go: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator. Upload a font and get back a kit with everything you need.
- byjove 13y agoOnly reason huh? nothing to do with prettifying the web and making developers happy, because that doesn't benefit Google in any way...
- RexRollman 13y agoNot directly it doesn't.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 13y agoIf they cared about that they'd keep Reader open.
- darkhorn 13y agoGoogle Fonts, Google Public DNS, Google Analytics, Google+ like gadgets, Google Adsense, Google CDN for jQuery etc, Google services like Search and Gmail, Embedded Youtube videos, Google Chrome word correction sugesstions and safe sites checks, Firefox safe page checks, probably many things within Android backend. Probably they know with 99.9999999% accuracy how many online web users are out there.
- nkuttler 13y agoConsidering that browsers have caches this isn't a huuuge issue.