Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers
miranj.in
miranj.in
Really, it's just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page's text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there's always reader mode.
We realize some strange folks somewhere are still running IE6, but they aren't the ones responding to our campaigns anyway.
"Did you know your web page is unreadable in Firefox?"
"Yeah, but our analysis shows very few of our visitors use Firefox."
Sorry, my QA guy is not going to test with Konqueror just because you happen to like it.
Do you get paid by vision-impaired users to represent them? Great! Do that.
And this nonsense about design ignoring the vision impaired is misinformed. Now that we're able to accurately represent content using the full spectrum of HTML, accessibility is better than ever. Most of the sites I build these days have very little ineffective syntax. Disable the stylesheet entirely, if you're into living like it's 1999, and you'll still be able to see the content.
You may not care for an ultramodern brand's style, but that only tells you one thing: it's not for you!
One of the reasons I minimize my use of web apps (e.g., Gmail) is because I got tired and frustrated with the re-styling every 6-12 months; where I was no longer comfortable just because it didn't look the same; and I was no longer efficient because it was all re-organized; and I was annoyed because I was having conscious thoughts about the interface, instead of just using it to get stuff done. (This happens to a lesser extent with desktop apps, but at least I can avoid updating, etc.) Did someone consciously decide their product was no longer for me, so they didn't care what I think? Will they care if their decisions make me stop using their product?
I'm hesitant to accept the opinionated, brusque ideas about design being thrown around here, but even if I did, they don't seem to account for the effects of evolving the product while the userbase stays the same. I get the idea of incremental progress, but can you seriously believe that every change is good and is worth the costs? Yesterday, we missed the mark with skeuomorphism, today we know we need to throw it all out, and then we will have achieved perfection!
You seem to be unaware of the human element in all of this; designers are proud to create the best experience they can, developers are proud to implement it, and clients are proud to let it speak on their behalf.
You answer your own question, and emphasize my point with your perception of "shoddy clickbait" being popular. Obviously, for some reason, people like it. Who are you to say it should be eliminated?
So, again, if you don't like it, it's not intended for you.
If your user is a developer or designer with a rMBP then you should design around their wants, needs, use cases, etc. If your user is a middle manager at a finance company using a Dell from 2009 then you have to design and develop to their use cases.
Very rarely will these two overlap; only on very very large products. As a designer I'm not going to forgo using a font or color pallete that my user finds attractive simply because a random person using antiquated hardware/software might stumble upon my product.
Read this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility and repent
Even if some of this is true, thinking "very rarely will they overlap" seems so short-sighted.. you're just going to turn away possible users because you decided your product is niche enough that you can predict exactly what environment (electronic, biological, and physical) your user is viewing it through?
I mean, I knew the stereotype that designers are opinionated, but this is a whole new level...
It's a losing cause. It's not just the person you're responding to, even Apple does the same.
I'm running OS X 10.10 on my desktop and it is OK, so I tried it on my non-retina Macbook Pro. But the overall appearance, including the fonts, was just "yeech". I'm not a graphic designer and so I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong. But a bunch of fiddling around with fonts and Accessibility didn't help.
So I reverted to OS X 10.8 and everything is nice again. Time Machine made it so so so easy to revert.
It's also a matter of designing around net positivity. If 70% of my users respond positively to a design then I've done pretty well. 30% in most cases is a small number. That doesn't mean alienating and ignoring that 30%, but it also doesn't mean throwing out the approval of the 70%. It's a compromise. (I didn't think I needed to be so explicit in my first comment).
Larger products, let's say Facebook, even 1% is a million users. So of course they can't ignore them.
I've obviously struck a sensitive chord here with the HN crowd so I won't go any further.
Around here at least, it's weird to bake the assumption of a non-large product into your design philosophy. You don't want to have a large, diverse userbase? Is your design actually defining who your userbase is, rather than the other way around? If you want that, we can't stop you, but it seems strange to us.
This is the Kool-Aid drunk by designers who actually don't give a fuck about their users. 'rarely', 'very very large products'... this is the cry of the lazy, crappy designer.
Then the designers recognized they can reduce the size of the text to the unreadable sizes. They did that too, because it's about the design, they don't care about the text anyway, and the ants droppings look better on the page than these letters.
More recently, some claim that they read better gray text on the lighter gray background. I always used IPS screens and it was never readable. I guess these guys turn their brightness and contrast controls to 110% then wonder that the black text is not readable. Repeat after me: the readers don't set the screen like you.
And all these pages with long of nothing because their Njdxjdfj font is the only one which can present their glorious design. Yes it's annoying.
I'm extremely happy there's a reader mode in iOS and in Firefox. But guess what? The most annoying pages are almost by rule also not available in the reader mode. I wonder how they manage to achieve that. Do they tweak the page until the readers can't show it? Or is that just grandiose ignorance?
And remember these glorious Flash-only pages?
One thing I'm sure: whenever the technology gives some chance for some to produce unreadable pages, they will produce unreadable pages. The last 20 years were consistent with that.
My favorite old page, fully readable:
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
Compare with the current home page of Bell Labs:
Is the goal of the modern design, when used as in this example, to convey information or to confuse?
The designer is certainly not the only responsible. The title of the page is: "Redefining Our Relationship with Information." Yes indeed.
If you absolutely have to use icon fonts, at least use ligatures instead of a PUA. That lets you fallback to a whole word if the specific font isn't present, or if the user relies on assistive technology like a screen reader.
And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?
Some reasons:
* They are scalable vector images without the download bloat and processing load of rendering them with SVG.
* Raster icons need to closely match the screen DPI or they look awful - eg Retina displays made raster icons look like blocky pixellated afterthoughts.
* They inherit colors, sizes etc from CSS the same way as their surrounding elements.
I use the [1] Unicode symbol semantically on my blog with a custom font at http://eligrey.com/blog/
1. Edit: Hacker News seems to have stripped the character from my message. I am referring to U+1F50D left-pointing magnifying glass.
Is there any reason why they don't? It seems it would indeed be much better.
Most web fonts don't look that nice on Windows. Windows heavily relies on hinting and doing this properly is a lot of hard mind-numbing work.
Most web fonts also aren't that readable. Sure, your wide/thin/square font looks very modern and stuff, but it's not as readable as a Verdana or Arial. When I visit your site, I'm there for the text, not the font.
Me too. In Firefox on OS X, I simply set Lucida Grande as my default font, and I uncheck the box that allows pages to choose their own fonts. I don't think I'm missing much.
I don't want my browser downloading custom fonts, autoplay videos, animated GIFs, or CSS elements that move around on their own (or refuse to move when I scroll). I am also not interested having my browser download javascript or tracking cookies from dozens of third party domains when I visit a site.
Unless you're paying by the byte, what gets downloaded shouldn't concern you from a well-developed site that doesn't hang on your phone.
Unfortunately, in this copy/paste era, too many sites shoot themselves in the foot.
The cause of the concern should then be addressed, not the person having the concern.
1. most developers aren't good, or at least not paid well enough to do what they consider a good job.
2. you cannot deliver web-fonts taster than you can deliver a page without web-fonts. Web-fonts will always be driving latency. On average in a noticably annoying way more often than not.
Besides... Downloading a 1MB font to render some typical 4kb of text? What sort of madness drives this behaviour?
I can definitely see the potential for a web-fonts blocker extension, like I now have ad-blocker and in the past had a flash-blocker (which now no longer seems needed).
NoScript blocks fonts, video, audio, and JavaScript.
Google must be doing it to improve performance.
As for caching, mobile phones have very small caches and will reload fonts frequently, specially with the large variety of fonts available. And if the browser can cache font files it can also cache stylesheets with base64 encoded fonts, saving requests at the same time.
Are you sure? Typically a <script> tag pointing to a cached script will still trigger a conditional GET.
It appears that google are not doing that, they are indeed using these scripts to track your users.
Take jquery for example:
Response:
Remote Address:[2a00:1450:4009:80a::200a]:443
Request URL:https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js
Request Method:GET
Status Code:304 OK
age:414824
alt-svc:quic=":443"; p="1"; ma=604800
alternate-protocol:443:quic,p=1
date:Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:17:51 GMT
expires:Wed, 28 Sep 2016 15:17:51 GMT
server:GFE/2.0
status:304Right. You no longer need Javascript to download fonts. You don't need multiple versions of the font any more, either. TTF, OTF, or WOFF work on everything current.[1] Early iPhone models (IOS < 4)only accepted fonts in SVG, which was strange, but now they're on board.
If you need to convert from one font format to another, see [2].
[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=ttf [2] http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator
I've been online since long before the World Wide Web was a thing, and I've watched the evolution of Web design from TBL's first proposals, through background wallpapers, animated flames, multicoloured layouts, spacing pixels and table-based layouts through to the saviours that were supposed to be CSS and AJAX.
It's all been a terrible mistake.
I'm leaning to a model in which a standard set of templates exist: article page, index, gallary, catalog, search -- and the client has a set of standard (or custom) templates to view them with. Client overrides server and author.
Yes, this means putting all but three Web designers in the world out of work. Couldn't happen soon enough.
A recent discovery of mine was that the combination of uMatrix and Stylish is fantastic. As the first blocks by default all CSS, fonts, and JS, I'm given a blank canvas from which I can apply my own preferred stylings (look up Edward Morbius's motherfucking Web page for a general taste). https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ
Before this it was a stable of over 1800 local stylesheets, most quite brief and/or standard, to fix common gripes.
And it's not just me. A visually disabled friend, totally blind in one eye, 20/60 vision at best with correction in the other, and generally not particularly computer literate, has endless frustrations with gimmicky websites with all the usual crap: low contrast, tiny font sizes, hard-to-read fonts, poor colour choices, content which re-renders multiple times,etc.
I just spent an hour at the local Apple store exploring various accessibility options. While there are some for Mac and iOS products, they're terribly insufficient. No way to globally set user font sizes. No way to make "reader mode" the default for either Safari or Firefox. No alternative to mouse and icon interactions in far too many cases.
And that's just the OS. The Web as a whole is many times worse.
Readability Mode for the entire Web, with a small header space for branding, would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
But this will never suffice for companies that have a marketing budget. They need to promote their brand more than they need to distribute information. It's not the web's fault. And any scheme you come up with is going to suffer the same fate.
For an excellent example of the first half of this, see Mark Pilgrim's excellent "Dive into HTML5". I'm referring here to the structure of the document, not the content (though that's also excellent). The document is virtually entirely bare-bones HTML5 tags, with a typical nesting depth of 2-3 elements, rarely more.
Mark has also applied an excellent (and being the exception, proving the rule that virtually all CSS sucks) stylesheet to the site. Again with a minimum of chrome and glitter.
My thought, again, is that, similar to how LaTeX offers a few basic documenbt templates, a set of standardised site semantic layouts, for which clients offer standard presentation formats, with variants for high and low contrast, "night mode", and simplified design, might be preferable.
Am I now expected to either write, or hunt down a stylesheet for every single host?
Without the CSS, the navigation sidebar just goes at the top, which makes most sites unusable.
I'm not claiming that the user experience of individually styling each website is preferable. I am stating that the design experience of utterly nuking virtually all sites' CSS is vastly preferable to suffering through what's shoved at me.
Using Stylinsh, I can:
1. Create a default CSS which applies to all sites.
2. Create individual stylesheets matching a specific site, or regex, or domain.
3. Create one or more stylesheets which apply to multiple sites, though those have to be individually specified.
Again: I'm not claiming that the overall result is perfect or even good, simply that, for me, with reasonable CSS chops and sufficient frustration with the status quo to care and take the effort, that what I end up with is better than what I started with, and worth the (varying levels of) effort (on a per-site basis).
The more often I use/visit a site the more likely I am to change its CSS to suit my tastes. Some site I visit only once, I'll simply leave unstyled or apply "unstyled" to it (manually).
I've posted a few iterations of "unstyled" to Pastebin, one from August: http://pastebin.com/7TRnwG78
(This may not be the most recent, system on which that lives is currently unavailable.)
That said, there's a separate "annoyances" CSS (which I don't believe I've posted though you might find a copy via DDG/Google) which attacks a whole slew of other gripes: headers, footers, interstitials, modals, flyovers, etc. It's very broad (e.g., [class="modal"], [id="modal"], modal, ..., with a bunch of similar patterns for annoyances. I've got to explicitly override those on selected sites, particularly where they use confirmations and other dialogs.
Of course, the root of the problem is that HTML is not really a good basis for implementing hypermedia.
It's possible to do _very_ good things with HTML, CSS, tables, and Javascript even. I've done a few things myself of which I'm somewhat proud (my CodePen, referenced earlier in this thread, carries a few examples). But, as with much else, it's possible to throw out complete crap.
And browsers will render it. They've got multiple sets of quircks and brokenness modes to deal with just such issues.
Search engines will index that crap. Hell, many SEO optimisation techniques themselves are based on abuse of HTML (keyword and other semantics stuffing).
Tools that simply say "fuck you" and stop rendering shit content, or just do what the user actually wants, would go a large step toward fixing this. Various ReaderMode tools (now on Safari and Firefox) are a key example. I'm actually using the latest Firefox for Android and it specifically addresses a number of my own key browser grips in at least part (though by no means all or completely).
Google's Chrome is actually about the worst of browsers from this perspective, it's leaning far too much in the direction of yielding full power to Web authors. Yes, it's possible to create some slick Websites in that process, but you and up with gobs and gobs of shite.
http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/
Honestly, I miss the days when Netscape Navigator would just halt rendering in the middle of your page, saying, “No, I will not parse any more of your shit until you fix it.”
The arguments I've had when higher ups want the Web page to render pixel perfect to the "design". "But all renderers are different"
Edit: check this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3129953/ about reiventing the wheel, a horizontal scrollbar to flip pages instead of the plain vertical scrollbar of the browser.
The NIH page suffers in that it doesn't scroll down, allowing for full-screen viewing on tablets such as the one I'm using. There's a permanently visible browser nav and tab bar on it, which I'd prefer to have go away. Many sites with persistent headers suffer similarly (e.g., G+).
Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my 9600 baud dial-up connection.
I agree the reader should be able to override appearance when it suits them, but there's nothing bad about content creators using form as well as content to communicate. Feel free to block web fonts, but you should recognise you are losing something more important than mere decoration by doing so.
We must not also forget that web fonts have replaced text graphics. They can be small, but when used on every header or with multiple states in interfaces, they added up quickly. Not only are web fonts lighter, they are real text. We don't want to revert to text graphics.
What we have is the designer on one end, and the user on the other. The designer wants to decide how the page is served. The user wants to choose how they consume the page. Some users may add salt and pepper, or remove all the tomatoes. Giving users power cannot be a bad thing. But do we want features that automatically change our food no matter where we go? And there may be some allergic to everything. Maybe they'll turn off JS and not load any images, and be okay with half the sites being broken. But they will always be a minority that other's shouldn't be too concerned about. And they will always do whatever they want.
To know if a web font is ugly requires tasting it first, so at that point, you've already paid for what you may have tried to save. But considering how little weight web fonts are and how important they can be as part of what is being expressed by the composer of a page, ignoring it would be like randomly removing an ingredient deemed important by the chef.
Why risk those great sites for the one's that suck? Why would we allow the worst food to dictate all of our meals? Shouldn't we just call out bad web sites for what they are, instead of crippling our hard earned technology?
Imagine iOS 9 with Arial. Fonts are important.
The use of bad fonts
The loading of fonts via third parties
Add blockers block those third party fonts.
Personally I block all fonts via a Firefox setting because my dinner is served much faster and still tastes good (or better)
That may be true in the United States and Western Europe, where a typical font only needs to encode a hundred glyphs or so. But even Google webfonts begin to get rather hefty if you include Central European and Cyrillic characters.
Things get even worse with CJK fonts that have (tens of) thousands of glyphs. I have yet to find a Korean webfont that comes in at less than a megabyte, and most common webfonts in my country take up several megabytes apiece. It's really annoying if you're on a metered connection, not to mention s-l-o-w to load.
> We don't want to revert to text graphics.
Of course we don't want to... but things are so bad in CJK-land that I once wrote a library [1] that automatically generates text graphics given a string and a font file. It creates a separate image for each word, reuses them where possible, and automatically adds alt-text for search engines and screen readers. So at least it's an improvement over old-fashioned text graphics.
And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn't have to cURL your website or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends are cute, but there's nothing like actually being able to read a page.
(and if you're using Canvas or something, I've already closed the tab.)
I suspect a huge part of the legibility problems a lot of sites see is the gamma, DPI, and font rendering of the designer's system not matching their audience. A very thin font with gray-on-gray might look great on a calibrated 5K iMac with Safari, but be completely unreadable on Firefox for Windows on a standard 1080p screen with bad colors.
I have 3x Dell U2414H (absolutely fantastic monitors, if you can find any for sale still (discontinued recently), buy them all up), and display in newest stable Chrome, newest stable Firefox, MSIE11 in Windows with unadjusted ClearType settings (only MSIE11 listens to Cleartype settings, and basically destroys ultra-thin fonts if you adjust Cleartype, so, uh, just leave it alone, trust me), and then Safari on a retina MBP because Safari both has different (possibly better, possibly worse, clearly different) font rendering but also the fact it is on HiDPI increases the difference in how things are rendered on top of it just being Safari.... and if I don't like what I see in all four, then I fiddle with it until text is clearly readable.
I'm okay with thin fonts, I actually adore them because they are easier to read on larger font sized text over thicker text, but please check it on a standard Windows non-HiDPI machine, especially if you're a Mac fanatic that loves Safari on a Retina Mac. Just do it.
I interviewed a designer whose personal "showcase" site didn't work on Chrome/Windows.
I'm a rMBP user but expect me to test on all major browsers/platforms.
I'm of the opinion that web designers should work on $500 Dell laptops with those lovely 1366x768 TN panels.
Don't even start me on colour-blind support (no, red is not a good choice as a 'highlight' colour when for 30% of men it's a flat 'dark' colour).
Especially when deciding what background color will distinguish ads from normal content.
The Dell IPS monitors are great, but I'd recommend the Dell U2415. It has a now-hard-to-find 16:10 aspect ratio, which gives more vertical pixels.
The real question is whether the time you spend on these bells and whistles contribute a positive ROI.
These days, with increased processing power and standards adoption generally available, we really have been able to push the weight of websites.
Conversely, battery powered devices and sketchy wideband internet access are growing rapidly.
Sure, we have the power, but it's becoming apparent that at this scale effeciency is very important. More users than ever want more content faster than ever.
Globalized (literally) asset sharing, with technologies like digest references in script and link tags could make a big difference. Why not even pre-package really popular stuff (jQuery, Helvetica, etc) with the browser or OS?
Feel free to buy me one, I'm a starving designer :)
Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
It's an subscription.
I tried finding reliable data for cache hit/miss rates for popular CDNs but was unsuccessful. Is there a site out there tracking this that designers could refer to? It would be good to know if simply concatenating all your CSS (for example, or JS) into one file and serving it from Cloudfront would beat scattering it across several providers and hoping the majority of visitors had cached copies. I suspect the single file would perform better but I have no reliable data to support this.
The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps not entirely scientific, but things like 'aura', 'emotion', 'atmosphere' and 'feel' can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing us to emote with others.
Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here) than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is going on.
Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset.
That's because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the internet and remove all 'colour' would take away the beauty and the poetry of what the internet allows us to do.
Also, it's not in the spirit of the web to package content natively with the browser, because then only certain clients are able to understand the content correctly. The thought is to make everyone able to see exactly the same thing, with nothing stored on a local machine.
Packaging the most popular / representative, say, 256 free & open fonts together and distributing them with Firefox and Chrome would be a useful thing for designers of everything on the web other than fonts.
I think the better solution is more browser security work and transparent & common limits on computation time and download size that browsers will do the accounting for and enforce.
Windows (duh), OSX, and (optionally, see your distro) Linux include several Microsoft fonts (such as Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and New Times Roman, among others; Verdana being the closest to Open Sans, Fira, and Source Sans Pro in modern usage), so Microsoft/MSIE, before web fonts even existed, side stepped the need to always download fonts.
Using Google Fonts for distribution of web fonts is great and all, but it doesn't always prevent the need for font download, and Google Fonts always includes the local font name just in case you have it.
The weird part is, Chrome doesn't seem to include a copy of Open Sans (even though its Google's official font used almost everywhere), and neither does Android (but it does include Droid Sans and/or Roboto, with, I believe, both Droid Sans and Open Sans aliased to Roboto on Android 5.x), and Firefox doesn't include Fira (even though its the official font for FirefoxOS and they're trying to make Firefox itself be an app host like how Chrome is for a subset of Chrome apps (I'm not sure how Chrome apps vs Chromebook apps work here, are they the same thing? Is it a subset that works on both as long as you don't use Chromebook-only APIs?))
Also, why doesn't Microsoft and Mozilla also spawn their own CDNs for font distribution? Google refuses to have Wingdings-type fonts, even though this is the canonical way of doing vector images meant to be paired with text (due to the ease of use and better ways of handling outlines; WOFF2 eats fonts like Font Awesome up; SVG + gzip would never perform like that, 63kb for several billion icons), and their API for producing subsets of fonts would make icon fonts a shitload smaller, and also have a much higher chance of pre-cached icon fonts (just like popular real fonts enjoy).
For instance open sans seems to be used more and more. Here's what it's like without antialiasing (top), vs Arial (bottom) http://files.benjiweber.co.uk/b/fonts.png
Antialiasing hides some of the terribleness but it is still much harder to read than alternatives.
However, I disagree with a closed internet. Websites, like brick and mortar businesses, should be able to do what they want. They are responsible for the user's experience and should be able to craft it as they see fit. A browser (or extensions) should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may not want to experience the internet. (Ads in partciular, are a unique part of the discussion).
I appreciate websites like medium, reddit, facebook, pinterest, and others that standardized content formats for users to experience in a consitent way.
The "death of RSS" is related here too. It's a complex issue. With RSS the user has significantly more control, but the problem is that you lose context and it can often become hard to browse large amounts of content.
Unfortunately, both websites AND web browsers are set on taking choices from users and forcing agenda on them.
From the very beginning, almost every standard related to the web has made it very clear that ultimately clients get to choose what to display, what to retrieve, and how to display it.
Yes, that freedom comes with a price, but it's a price worth paying. For users that are visually impaired, it's particularly important to be able to override the suggestions of the content being displayed.
I don't see how there's an "agenda" involved in what any web browsers are doing today. The end user is the one choosing to use the client, choosing to use the content blocker, etc.
If Apple or Google made the choice to start blocking content using the browser itself (on their own), you might have a point, but that hasn't happened (yet).
What price, and who pays it?
Put another way, content may be king, but the client is the emperor.
My issue is with the idea of grouping web font blocking with ad blocking. A user should choose separately if they'd like to block:
• Ads
• Tracking scripts
• Creative assets that may slow web performance (like web fonts)
• Other non-essential, non-creative scripts that may slow web performance
In short, I don't disagree with what you've said at all. However, content providers must keep in mind that ultimately, they don't control how their content is presented or what part of it is displayed.
I appreciate that websites want to look good. But browser rendering has always varied between devices and user preferences, and fonts in particular have always been a prominent configuration item. User displays have had varying DPIs and widths, users can set their preferred minimum font size and preferred window size, their preferred serif and sans-serif fonts, and zoom text size with or without other page elements. Some users have to use screen-reading software! This has always been in the interest of the user's readability with their particular setup, and the openness of the web to be used with whatever setup the user has.
My only point is, your argument has nothing to do with "a closed internet". Or "it can often become hard to browse" (if you let users configure their browsers as they prefer). Right...
Flash, ActiveX and Java applets are a "brick and mortar" of the web and thank god they're long dead as means of web design.
Luckily, there is a "brick and mortar" of the modern times where publisher or retailer has full control over experience. It's native apps and users seem to love 'em.
May as well start the arms race when we know who will finish it.
websites will simply require to connect to a webcam showing you browsing the site to allow viewing.
We'd better devise a way to painlessly charge users ¢0.1 per view.
Worse is that there was absolutely no requirement for them to choose a small serif font for any particular web design reason.
The text on the site is not black but it's 90% OK on my tablet (8" and about 2500x1600 px). Black text would probably be better. There is also a lot of useless () margin on the left but I can punch to zoom and make the text fill all the screen. No issues with font color at that size.
() Useless because I want to read the text comfortably on the tablet. The screen of my computer is larger and I probably won't mind that margin there.