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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

personally i block web fonts regardless, particularly on mobile.

I would do this too, if I could reliably tell icon fonts (which are important) from frilly fonts (which I couldn't care less)

I've seen people arguing in favor of this but what's the reason?

I do it for bandwidth. Why should I need to download a font when my device already has several on it.

I would rather reframe this question: what is the reason to download fonts? Downloading leads to page rendering lags and to reporting my browsing behaviour to google, while I see no positive effects from those fonts at all. So why I should be interested in downloading them?

Fonts are one of the dimensions of design. If you've ever enjoyed, for example, one of Edward Tufte's books on visualisation ("The quantitative display of data" etc), part of their appeal as excellently crafted books stems from the choice of fonts. The same happens on the web. See, for example The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com.

Obviously everyone is free to block fonts, just like you can block all images or use a text-only browser etc. But to categorically deny even the possibility that well-chosen fonts can enhance the experience for some people seems disingenuous.

As for me speed is much more important that any pretty look. I would rather read internet from terminal with monospaced fonts, if it would add speed and do not harm functionality. But there are no browsers that can do it without losing web-sites functionality -- js, a tons of interaction of modern web needs a very complex and slooow tools to render.

Maybe it is just me, but I believe that for other users speed is also matters.

The most legible font is the font you're most used to. If I let designers chose fonts for me then I'll have to read lots of different fonts, instead of just my own favorite. It can only harm my enjoyment of the web.

But blocking icon fonts makes the web less usable for you.

As NoScript does. Or Ghostery. It is problems of web, not mine. I could find another site, if some one does not work properly.

* Downloading leads to page rendering lags and to reporting my browsing behaviour to google*

… if you are downloading Google fonts.

Yes, self-hosted fonts is better. If web-designers start to host their fonts, I will have one less reason for not downloading fonts.

What is the reason to have CSS at all? It just adds to page download times, and I see no positive effects from page designers tweaking margins and padding and colours. Why don't we just view pages with the browser's built-in default styles for all the HTML elements?

Good CSS lessens download times, by simplifying html. CSS adds structure to html-code, it helps me to write greasemonkey scripts or to block annoying (wasting space or blinking) parts of page with uBlock. There are technical reasons to use CSS and at least some of them is good for me as a user. There are no good reasons for me to allow page to use fonts except those I explicitly installed into my system.

My reasons:

- Bandwidth: I don't want to download your fonts. I already have the ones I like on my computer and I've configured which ones I want to use (basically DejaVu everywhere).

- Crappy type: Your thin type with low-contrast colours hurt my eyes. Or slabs with huge contrasts. Or exaggerated serifs.

(BTW "you" here is purely rhetorical, not the commenter I'm responding to.)

Speed, I imagine, both fewer resources to download, saving bandwidth and time and maybe less processing to do for display, too? I'm not sure about the latter, but the former, I've seen for sure. Much quicker text draw without Google fonts on my mobile.

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