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Comment by discreditable | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think that web fonts are more page weight than they are worth. Is any significant number of your users going to be able to tell the difference between your 2MB webfont and Arial/Helvetica or Times?

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On HN I've seen posts from people that have locally installed to their machine all or the majority of Google Fonts. It's kind of a "best of both worlds" approach in that you get a speedier web and all the nice typefaces and I've been debating doing it myself.

It almost seems like a useful browser service to possibly cache common font CDN fonts all the way into the system font store and maybe for the OSes to consider adding a lot more of the free as in speech/beer fonts into OS images.

Personally, I set Firefox to use the Croscore fonts and disallow use of any other fonts. It causes some weirdness with pages that use icon fonts (but for some reason, not all of them). Overall I like it.

Absolutely, web fonts are overrated. For most websites (i.e. websites where the majority of your readers have no idea what the difference between a font and a typeface is), your best bet in terms of speed and cross-platform aesthetics is to use a stack of system fonts.

See http://www.awayback.com/revised-font-stack/ for examples of well chosen cross platform font stacks that each achieve a certain style.

I like seeing the work those guys put in to that. My current (admittedly lazy) tendency is to use whatever default serif/sans-serif the user's browser has set. My reasoning is that if the user cares at all, they've set that font. Otherwise it doesn't matter. I might use one of those font stacks instead in the future.

I came to a similar conclusion and ripped out Butterick's gorgeous Equity Text from my web pages.

I still miss it somewhat, but then again, I'm hosting on NFSN and see the effect immediately.

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