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Comment by robscallsign | Hacker News Reader

I live in a rural area with bad internet, and the trend to load all of these external fonts, images and javascript externally over https basically makes the web unusable for us. The overhead of the handshakes required by the https connection greatly increased the page load time, and there is about a 1-in-4 chance of one of them timing out and not loading, so as a result the page doesn't load properly or pauses and stops loading.

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There are so many solutions!

* In uBlock Origin (which is a must have on bad internet): Settings > Block remote fonts

* In browser, Firefox about:config, gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled, Chrome run with --disable-remote-fonts

* Download fonts when on good connection

> You can download all Google Fonts in a simple ZIP snapshot (over 300MB)

> https://github.com/google/fonts

installation depends on OS, on Arch Linux it would be

    $ yay -S ttf-google-fonts-git

basically it puts font file under /usr/share/fonts/

Google recommends

> using a fonts manager (such as SkyFonts) that automatically syncs the latest versions of fonts from the Google Fonts API to your computer.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq

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I browse with JS disabled by default in uMatrix, turn it off on problematic websites (maybe ten times a day). It would revert back to disabled on next browser reload. And I have maybe 20 hosts enabled by default which I use often enough.

Unfortunately

> If the local() function is provided, specifying a font name to look for on the user's computer, and the user agent finds a match, that local font is used. Otherwise, the font resource specified using the url() function is downloaded and used.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face

And this is not the case for Google Fonts anymore, for example

https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto%20Sans

I've created issue

https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2855

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>> Any correctly-coded website will try a local source first, which should help a lot for poor connections.

> Then Google Fonts is not correctly coded, as it'll use remote font only. And myriads of websites reusing Google Fonts snippets. To try local source first, you have to explicitly ask for it in @font-face/src which Google Fonts does not do.

> So installing font into your OS won't help you with any website using Google Fonts service.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301830

Are you just clinging to the last dev version of uMatrix, or did you find an active fork or something?

I use last one, it works and I've implemented shortcut to relax restrictions

https://github.com/sergeykish/uMatrix/commit/929a25e39fc1d38...

Many of us still us just use the latest version of uMatrix on addons.firefox.com. Nothing else comes close to giving you the same kind of control.

Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place? A CDN basically. I know jQuery and Bootstrap recommend using their CDNs so browsers have the copy in their cache.

Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.

From TFA:

> Since Chrome v86, released October 2020, cross-site resources like fonts can’t be shared on the same CDN anymore. This is due to the partitioned browser cache

Which is one of the many reasons I've stopped the almost hourly updates of Chrome. I feel fo people that have bad bandwidth or poor wireless connections. One of my favorite rants if web builders and more importantly the managers of team that build websites were forced to use a DSL speed level connection daily a lot of the cruft would go away.

The same argument applies to developers not using the state of the art computers packed with RAM. These problems can't be found in QA: if they even show up at all it's too late.

Sure, their code will compile faster but they won't get a feel for how it behaves in the real world. Probably the best is to have fast build servers on the LAN while typing at pedestrian machines.

Whatever excuses we want to make for forcing web devs to use old netbooks from 2004, I'm down with it (everyone knows they think they're cooler than us, we need to knock them down a notch). Usability? Cool yes that sounds very important or whatever.

It's exactly what I've been doing, give or take a few years. I also take the time to boot up my Win95 VM and test in IE3, Netscape in Wine, Lynx, w3m, and many others, with and without JS.

The result is designs I can actually be proud of, not ashamed.

Of course, no one is paying me for it. And that's OK. I'd rather be doing this for frew than getting six figures working on advertising bullshit which will be gone tomorrow.

I am a software developer; why would I want to "take myself down a peg"?

Also I doubt there are many people reading the web on 2004 netbooks. You know what I am talking about.

1. I believe the parent post was referring to non-web-developers taking web-developers down a peg, not anyone taking themselves down a peg.

2. I used a small 2007 laptop well in to 2018, and I believe that the software I wrote was better for it.

I must have missed the tweet where web developers were declared cooler than other developers — or was the other way around? I can’t even fathom who is being impugned here, though clearly somebody is quite upset.

At this point Big Tech is no different than Big Government and just as out of touch with those forced to live with it's decisions.

If they didn’t do this you (or someone with similar attitudes) would be complaining that cross site caching allows fingerprinting and violates privacy (which is almost certainly why they did do this).

Yeah, however, they could make these things configuration rather than imposing a policy on every user: in different contexts different privacy/performance tradeoffs are acceptable

And then the criticism would be “Google enables violating the privacy of rural and poor customers with less access to high speed Internet”. I’m not saying any one of these criticisms is wrong. Just that they’re predictable and there’s basically no move Google could make besides shutting down that would satisfy the complaints (and even then it would be the ultimate “Google kills products” meme).

So? You are just describing how discourse works.

Entity A does thing that impacts entity B. Entity B makes those effects known to a broader group than entity B. Maybe entity A does thing about it, maybe not.

I’m describing a situation where a certain set of opinions is insatiable because sating any subset thirsts another.

ok, that makes sense, but I think that describes such a general idea. I am incapable of imagining a single thing everyone on the entire planet is capable of agreeing on; so inherently, any action anyone could possibly ever take would be subject to mutually exclusive opinions.

But this is exactly the nature of the problem: a company that has basically the power of big government dictating what people will do without their previous approval. The very existence of such a company is anti-democratic. Now we are stuck with a single company dominating a public service (internet) that affects the lives of billions of people around the world and we don't have a say on how they manage this network.

No, the nature of the problem is that Google (and big government, in its own ways) is trying to solve hard problems with no good solution. There are clear downsides (described in this thread) to all the possible options, and even the option of letting people choose between bad options doesn't actually make people's lives better at the end of the day.

Keep in mind that Chrome basically pioneered the concept of doing OS-level sandboxing between websites. We can complain all we want about how Google should give people the option to choose whether they want hard site isolation or not, but if it weren't for Google's investment in Chrome, we wouldn't even think of the option. Would it be better to live in a world where hard problems don't get possible solutions at all, where no one feels like they have choices taken away from them because the choices were never given them in the first place?

(I do firmly agree that the very existence of Google is anti-democratic, though... but I get there via an entirely different argument. I'm glad to see more people concluding this, nonetheless.)

The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution. Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live.

As for technology existing only because of Google or some other large company, that's not the case. Google was more innovative when it was smaller. Netscape created the whole browser industry as a small startup. Just let a lot of small to medium size companies compete in the market and split the ones that become so big as to become a threat to the whole ecosystem.

> The secret of democracy is that, even when there are no good options to choose from, people agreed on the solution.

No, a plurality of people agreed on the solution, and everyone else disagreed with it but was stuck with it.

> Therefore you are not a the whim of a single person or entity and this legitimates the way you live.

Now you're at the whim of a popularity contest.

Yeah, to me the solution is configurability with sensible defaults. It increases the work of the developers, but it has the benefit of reducing the number of decisions the developers have to make on behalf of the user.

There are many problems that cannot be solved by the resources available to a medium sized company. Which is why you need multiple governments to get together to help out something like AirBus or space programs.

Similarly Google at its scale can tackle large problems more efficiently than having 10000 medium sized companies pool their resources together to do the same.

In other words, everything has pros and cons that depend on each particular situation. Large companies aren't "all bad" and small companies aren't "all good", you just chose to give lower priority (or ignore) ti the bad aspects of small companies while showing concern with the bad aspects of large companies.

That's a theory without data to back it up. Especially in technology, where big innovation usually comes from small to medium sized companies. What smaller companies cannot do is coerce the market to extract profits at the level done by Google and their pears. That's why we need anti-trust legislation.

To a first order approximation, nobody actually changes any of these advanced settings. The default is what most people use, and most settings might as well never exist.

Sure, but the people that do change get these settings are people too, and they’re often the type of people that will be vocal about your product and recommend it to people.

1) “There is a setting” is a good way to deflect from the more difficult job of making decisions about what the product should do.

2) Every setting comes with an opportunity cost. More than one product has died under a morasse of way too many configuration flags, or focused on features to please a minority of users at the cost of the product itself.

3) The group that says they want the setting is always bigger than the group that will actually use the setting.

Then why haven't any of those vocal people managed to get Firefox, KDE, or Devuan to nontrivial market share?

It doesn’t matter because the vast majority won’t change the default so sites won’t optimize for your use case anyway.

Most people don't understand how various options should be set if they even know those options exist.

If that's true, then it seems like moat-buidling since Google most certainly engages in user fingerprinting for their own ad platform.

This is exactly the type of damned if you do damned if you don't carping that GP was calling out.

Except we give government a monopoly on things like nuclear weapons...

Google could at least globally cache all the fonts when Chrome is installed; a one time download which is then available for use on all sites. If they licensed other browsers to do the same, the number of fonts available to designers would be large without the performance hit.

Good idea, except that the purpose of Google fonts (from Google's perspective) is to provide another means of tracking what sites people are visiting. Maybe a browser extension can do this though.

If they provide it in Chrome, there’s no reason they couldn’t track that stuff even without Google Fonts being bundled. The browser already knows every site you visit. Knowing you visited example.com that used “Example Sans” doesn’t give anything more than just knowing you visited example.com.

Bundling with browsers outside of Chrome would be a different story, but Google has no say over that anyways.

Not everyone uses Chrome. And Chrome's high market share is not a given going forward (especially with regulators eyeing it)

Hanlon's Handgun strikes again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691282

That's a bold assertion, care to back that up?

Google claims to not associate the data with particular users (it's anonymized), but there's nothing to stop it from using the data to know how popular certain sites or pages are, what region(s) visitors are coming from, and what user agents (browsers) are being used. And so on.

Let me ask you a similar question. Is there any evidence whatsoever that Google built this service out of the goodness of their hearts, and have no intent of using it to gain any sort of competitive advantage?

And if you do believe that, is there any evidence that Google will continue to spend millions of dollars supporting a service that gives them zero benefit? What does their track record say about that?

For the record, I'm not anti-Google, nor ultra privacy focused. I just think it's common sense that Google expects some sort of ROI here. To many, using Google fonts is considered a fair exchange (especially given that their data is anonymized) and I think that's a perfectly reasonable position. But make no mistake, there is a clear benefit to Google here.

I can’t see it as being true because Chrome already knows what sites you visit. Bundling the fonts wouldn’t change that.

Afaik the license terms may already allow this for most or all of the fonts.

Seems like then Google should include most of those fonts as part of the browser updates. Or even the top 90% seen.

You'd think there should be some technical solution to avoid the privacy issues of this. Eg make it always take one second or something.

The whole point of caching in the first place is to make things take less time when possible. That would be a strictly worse solution than self-hosting if performance is your most important outcome.

Perhaps a very limited set of response times. Increments of 1/10 of second.

That's only slightly better--an "attacker" (tracker?) still knows that everything except the longest response times are cache hits.

I’ll add this isn’t just Chrome.

> Wasn’t the point of Google Fonts that your browser would have in its cache fonts from Google so it wouldn’t download multiple copies from all over the place?

That's true for now (you should know that Google Chrome will deploy changes on caching third-party content), but webfont caching simply doesn't work as well when you've realized that websites that do use webfonts have a tendency to pick fonts that are unlikely to match another website.

That is not true for now, as the article points out.

Hasn't been true for Safari for quite some time, and Chrome followed suit two months ago. That's not "will deploy," it has already been released in Chrome v86.

Did you read the article?

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