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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of the extension, but the implementation in lacking. According to the project's gitlab[1], there's only a dozen or so libraries are actually being served. It doesn't seem to cache google web fonts, for instance. Some sibling comments mentioned LocalCDN, which has more libraries and also includes fontawesome, but still lacks google fonts.

[1] https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/-/tree/master/res...

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We should all be turning off web fonts anyway.

Citation needed?

Let’s say 80% of websites load Google Fonts. Now Google knows 80% of your browsing history.

Wikimedia is hosting some now to help alleviate this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23776786

Plus which, in the last decade I can remember exactly two instances where I was positively surprised by a custom font. All other times I didn't notice, would have preferred another font, or even opened up dev tools to revert the font. Given that the latter occurred more often than the instances where the custom font was a nice-to-have, I tend to agree that web fonts are just a lost cause, especially if it's (practically) a package deal with centralized tracking.

That suggests we should block Google Fonts, not disable web fonts entirely.

Google Fonts doesn't track the users, or associate the use with the user's account.

Says who? And why should i believe/trust that?

So the problem isn't Web fonts per se, it's using Web fonts from a CDN.

https://www.google.com/search?q=web%20fonts%20privacy%20expl...

Web fonts are no different from any other resource—you can easily serve them in privacy-friendly ways.

It would be nice to be able to specify that web fonts and other media elements come from the same site that serves the requested page.

I feel like that's a little unfair; it's a first step, an MVP, no?

According to archive.org, it's been around for at least 6 years https://web.archive.org/web/20151204211651/https://addons.mo.... This is well past the time when you can use the "it's an MVP" excuse.

The extension is at least 3 years old (by the oldest review comment, I also remember trying it around 2 years ago) and has 130k installs. It's a little beyond an MVP. I guess they don't do telemetry (oh the irony) so they don't have a way to know which files are most reused across CDNs.

I run decentraleyes and I like it.

The only thing I wish for is to add my own entries.

The extension idea is really good but is does break some websites plus its really slowing down the browser, after removing it was like a breath of fresh air.

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