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Comment by ahoge | Hacker News Reader

As a NoScript user, I rarely see web fonts and I prefer it this way. The text shows up instantaneously and the font will look great and be perfectly readable.

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.

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I know you are specifically talking about web fonts but let's face it: a lot of the modern web sucks ass.

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.

Your complaint is about design and how the site serves the page, not web fonts. Knowledgeable developers know how to deliver web fonts quickly and web fonts that looks good on your system.

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.

You, or anyone, don't get to tell people what concerns them. If they care about it, it's a concern.

The cause of the concern should then be addressed, not the person having the concern.

People are "concerned" about a lot of crazy things that shouldn't bother them.

This is good to have someone that defends these modern practices. My problem concerns NPR (i.e. npr.org) and their direction for the use of Drupal with a specific config for the sites for their local affiliates that often requires Google js for the site to function properly. Practically speaking, this will not impact most visitors, but most of these people are being pigeonholed without knowing it for advertising purposes. I have a big problem with this. It is now affecting non-technical people b/c of the use of (ad)blockers on iOS.

I have to wait for it to load, view it and charge my battery later. I don't get that time back. It concerns me.

You, too, are complaining about what the developer did and how he did it, not the web font. I use web fonts almost everywhere and our pages "blink" on.

You're overlooking the "view it" part. I don't want to see your web font in the first place.

> Knowledgeable developers know how to deliver web fonts quickly and web fonts that looks good on your system.

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).

Again, your complaint is with developers and designers who did not do their job properly, not with web fonts.

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 did the same in FF/Win - web fonts were a huge step back in my opinion - but immediately discovered a bunch of sites (including GitHub) abusing web fonts for button images, which made them pretty much unusable. Have you found a selective workaround for this?

I use Chrome and a plugin called Font Changer that lets one override fonts on pages. I don't need to have it turned on for all sites but it can be done. Mostly I just have everything set to Arial (I don't like reading any serif fonts on screen). Perhaps there is a plugin for Firefox that does a similar thing.

With uMatrix you can selectively enable various features for sites. I tend to start with minimal sets and re-enable to the point I've achieved sufficient functionality for my needs.

Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript. You are correct about Windows having objectively terrible font rendering though, and not just in web browsers.

> Web fonts done properly don't require JavaScript.

NoScript blocks fonts, video, audio, and JavaScript.

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