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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

Are there actually font blockers like ad blockers? That would solve the problem pretty easily for everybody who's annoyed. Although they probably won't be available for mobile browsers, where it's the most painful.

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In Firefox, >Options >Content >Fonts >Advanced Unchecking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..", blocks Webfonts and System fonts which configured User fonts have the necessary characters to render. In about:config gfx.downloadable_fonts.enable > false ,will block all webfonts, but this breaks many sites like imgur & g̶i̶t̶h̶u̶b̶ which use webfonts to display navigation icons.

More sites should switch from webfonts to svg for navigation https://github.com/blog/2112-delivering-octicons-with-svg / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11154834

I hadn't noticed github switched, I thought svg might be a bit heavier but they say pageload time hasnt suffered and rendering 'jank' improved.

Github were using correct ranges for their octicons at least. iirc there is a common software named 'fontawesome' which has caused trouble by creating custom webfonts with incorrect character ranges.

Font Awesome [0] is more of a service than software. Yes, if a site is using icon fonts, more likely than not they're using Font Awesome's (telltale "fa-" names in the source). They're adding a "pro" level that offers SVG as an option.

[0] http://fontawesome.io

I use NoScript for Firefox, which can block fonts for untrusted sites. There is also a setting, in the browser itself, to universally prevent sites from from using their own font specification, so your font choices are the only ones used everywhere. I used to use that, but some sites use icon fonts (e.g. Github), so I prefer being able to whitelist specific sites with NoScript. I also set a minimum font size to maintain comfortable reading across all sites.

uBlock Origin has a switch to block "remote fonts". Should work in Firefox on Android as well.

Firefox on Android has a switch for this. Menu -> Settings -> Advanced -> Show web fonts. The mobile web is remarkably faster to load with it off, even on wifi.

It's an option in uBlock, and it works great:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

I use this option. It's nice, but beware that your system fonts may not provide all of the unicode characters some pages expect, which can sometimes greatly hinder usability for sites that use such characters (and nothing else) in UI elements.

On my iPhone I use Fusion by Firefox as an app that gives me the option to block ads AND web fonts. Love it.

It's called Focus https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/focus

Ah, yep, my bad. I'm evaluating some other software called Fusion (completely non-related) and I guess it was just stuck in my brain.

Focus is awesome.

Interesting side-effect, it MAY be breaking Google AMP pages for me. I haven't really dug in to find out, but don't think a single AMP page has loaded for me on my phone.

about:config

search for webfonts.enabled. change to false.

alternatively, install noscript extension to have a UI with whitelist.

if you are not using Firefox, then i have no sympaty. wait until google cares about you.

Also, in preferences, you can uncheck the box that allows sites to choose fonts. After I saw your comment I fired up Chrome to check and was surprised that there seems to be no option for this.

Reason there is no option on chrome: google serves 99.9% of the fonts online for "free".

That means every site with a custom font from google now leaks the page and time you are accessing to them.

Same reason they forbid disabling 3rd party referrer on chrome.

With Firefox 49, it seems that the relevant configuration option is named gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled.

What about sites that use fonts for icons only?

Welcome them to the wonderful world of unicode! I flipped over all my icons to emoji, they're reasonably comprehensive, albeit less standardized (if you have really persnickity designers that might bother them).

Firefoxes 'user font' facility tries to accomodate them by fallback to Webfont if the glyphs are not included the user fonts unicode ranges. This works with sites that use icon or expansion unicode ranges to display icons, but some eg. imgur assign icons in the range for common characters, so they look dumb, but at least something gets displayed.

You can disable custom fonts in most browsers. I've had them disabled for years in firefox. My only complaint is that occasionally some sites use custom fonts as icons (why!?) for buttons. (microsoft in particular loves this)

In your hosts file or with PrivacyBadger, kill (iirc) fonts.gstatic.com

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