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Comment by test1235 | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually the first one to sneer in disbelief at super users who 'go nuclear' and disable the likes of javascript and images when browsing the web, but lately, I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?).

The only issues I've come across so far is when a site uses font symbols, but overall, I've been pleasantly surprised.

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hanlon's Handgun strikes again:

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

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

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

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.

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)

I’ll add this isn’t just Chrome.

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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

----

>> 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

If you want a really fast web experience, try disabling images and javascript too!

(on rereading this I sounded sarcastic, but I really wasn’t trying to be)

I'm using uMatrix and by default all javascripts are blacklisted until I explicitly enable it for the site. The downside of this is that lots of websites are broken, payment sites are non-functional, but after a week of building the whitelist, the web is somehow usable again.

I do the same. What a sad state the web is such that it is completely worth it to spend a week or two building a whitelist just to make it palatable.

I'm in the same boat (mobile + desktop), and agree. One needs to overcome the initial setup of the 80% most used sites. When that is done you get way less tweaking uMatrix. Improves speed, responsiveness, privacy, data usage and battery drain for me on my mobile. For quick one off article reads i load the page in Firefox Focus.

The worst is when the site is totally blank without it, then you enable it, and there's no interactivity: just images and a few words of text. It was totally unnecessary after all.

That's why I stopped enabling it.

Because I've noticed a strong correlation with lack of accessibility and poor quality content I ended up regretting wasting my time reading.

uMatrix hasn't been updated in a year and the repo has been archived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532973

You'll probably have to let it go someday :(

I'm well aware. But that day will be when it stops working, and right now it still works fine.

(Actually, it will be some time after that, since the day it stops working I will spend some time investigating how much work it would be to un-break it myself. The web can pry uMatrix from my cold, dead fingers. And I suspect I am not alone in feeling that way.)

You're not. uMatrix makes the web sane and I'm never lettign it go. What I did (on Firefox) is disable uMatrix in Private windows and I just go there for payment sites. All the rest of the wading through internet-crap is done from within the safe cocoon of uMatrix.

Is there a reason to not use uBlock Origin? I’ll admit, I never used uMatrix, so I don’t know what it does; only adblockers.

I use both, they work even better together! uMatrix for enabling JavaScript and cookies only on sites I care about, and uBlock Origin for some cosmetic filtering.

Not OP but it may have to do with how granular the control is - that's my reason anyway. uMatrix breaks down different types of elements into a literal matrix/grid by party, site, and element type (i.e. 1st or 3rd party, current site or e.g. js.stripe.com, cookies vs images vs scripts vs frames etc.) so you can, say, only allow cookies from the current site but block them from gstatic.com, block the javascript from analytics.cloudflare.com, and choose to allow embedded frames from hcaptcha.com, all by clicking cells in the grid.

uMatrix is uBlock Origin (uBO) with 2 differences:

1) No cosmetic filtering.

2) A more powerful interface, as _underfl0w_ describes at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302405

The key thing which that comment does not mention is that the interface enables a whitelist approach — block everything (read: as much as you want) by default and selectively allow certain types of content from certain sites.

This is important because of where your effort is spent.

With uBO, sites always work by default, but it requires manual effort — albeit mostly not by regular users — to stay up to date and blocking the latest trackers and annoyances. So, the amount of effort to keep uBO functioning is proportional to the rate of change in tracking. uBO is an arms race between advertisers and blocklist maintainers.

With uMatrix, all annoyances are gone by default, but often so is desired functionality. It requires manual effort to make the site work again, but once it works, it will continue to work until the site owner changes which types of resources must be loaded in order to function. So, the amount of effort required to keep uMatrix functioning is proportional to the rate of development, specifically major changes.

So, really, the two approaches take a different bet. uBO bets that trackers and ads will change less frequently than functionality. uMatrix bets the opposite. I know which bet I think is more reasonable. Advertisers have way more incentive to try and circumvent uBO than developers do to regularly break their site's functionality.

This all said, it works very well to use both. Having uBO installed means that when you're un-breaking sites in uMatrix, and you allow something that was actually advertising, uBO will usually catch it for you, so you don't have to see ads. This means you don't have to think quite so hard before allowing something in uMatrix, which makes the overall experience much more pleasant.

Actually, you _can_ configure uBO to block third-party content by default (by turning on advanced user mode); however, it's not as good as uMatrix as there is no split of request type (script versus image, etc.) as well as no UI to manage subdomains. You'll have to do that last part by editing the text configuration manually.

I think that's a feature now, at least in what's shipping in Chrome. You can click "custom" on any website and select the resources that site is allowed to load, by type.

UI screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/o0UsSdP.png

That's noscript, not uBlock Origin, and yes, uMatrix is basically that but more convenient.

> no UI to manage subdomains

You can expand any base domain to see subdomains -- click where there is no text. You can also click the "all" cell to expand to see all subdomains.

I do the same for noscript - it doesnt take much - just whitelist the site I am on if it doesnt work the way I want, and if I am worried about a payment on some site I can temporarily allow everything on that tab.

That plus adblock makes the web almost... enjoyable.

uBlock Origin has a setting to prevent loading elements above certain size. I personally find it to be a nice middle ground.

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

thx. didn't know about this option. uBlock Origin is just great!

It would be awesome if uBlock Origin was able to dynamically determine a size limit based on how long assets take to load. Perhaps this is a task for the browser itself, though. Monitor throughput and latency and adjust page load behavior to limit or delay large elements.

I wonder, though, how the client determines the size? Doesn't that require at least a HEAD request, introducing another round trip?

That’s the feature I really like in Brave, which stores that setting persistently per site in a convenient side panel. For things like unoptimized news sites it’s the difference between 10-30 and <0.5 second load times on the subway.

I do this. Works great, and it,s easy to skip sites who dgiaf.

I've been trying this every few years since browsers started supporting JavaScript and allowing users to disable it (back in the days before extensions and config options), and every time more and more of the web breaks w/o JSscript. 100% of the websites I need for work use JScript.

Most sites are still usable if you cherry pick a subset of the JS they invoke. Blocked trackers like Google analytics or tag manager rarely break things.

Except for sites that I use (internal websites for several vendors), and that is just to manipulate widgets, editors, and forms, and in one case, operate remote machinery. What methods for cherry picking do you like? I've only done all or nothing.

I use NoScript to whitelist a minimal set of what needs to be there. I won't ever allow analytics or doubleclick scripts. When I pop into a media site with 20+ third party scripts I just say nope and spend my time somewhere else. For basket case sites needed for work or e-commerce that are too fubared to work with script blocking I have a clean Chrome browser. None of those sites get to have tracking cookies from my main browser instance.

I HATED sites that used custom fonts when I lived in the country.

There are only two ways loading such a site goes:

a) you get to stare at a blank page for a couple minutes while the font downloads, if it downloads at all. (this seemed to be google's favorite way to screw over people with bad connections; acknowledgment that it's going to suck and doing it anyway)

b) you get two minutes into reading the page only for everything to suddenly jump somewhere else when it switches to the font. (this seems more like the result of ignorant web designers)

JS sucks but webfonts consistently make the web an awful place.

Re: (b): I know there’s a MathJax clone that works around the constant reformatting by precalculating the sizes of the various blocks and putting that into the HTML. So your browser basically makes a big empty placeholder box that the renderer will render into.

It’d be neat if something like that were available for web fonts. Each paragraph gets its own “block” that the installed font uses (and contains padding), and when the font downloads, it won’t reflow. But I’d assume it’d be way too complicated to deal with (different screen widths is the first to come to mind).

It's also likely to be implemented as a ton of JS to download, which would either block rendering (see option 1 above), or apply after the content loaded (see option 2).

So, a bunch of work to fix something that isn't broken when you turn off webfonts and respect user settings.

With an isomorphic web app, that should be calculated server side.

Using what screen size, page zoom level, and font rendering engine?

.... ah, right.

You'd just have to send the font metrics first or extract them early from a partially downloaded font. Then render with temporary glyphs.

The easiest fix is to ensure you pick a native fallback to your web font which has metrics which closely match your web font. You might have to use a different font-size and letter-spacing while it's loading, even.

Turn them off entirely, it's an about:config in Firefox and I think a commandline flag on Chrome(?)

Web fonts are a big one in terms of making various websites feel fast because, when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint.

With that said, they're a fantastic feature but are also way overused. You don't need web fonts unless your website is either heavily type-centric, or has font-related dependencies (such as embedded content of some kind). Icon fonts are also a neat use of web fonts, but they don't make the page "feel slow" when their rendering is slow, because icons loading slower affects our perception of a page's loading time less than its text.

In my experience it's not about a website being "heavily web-centric" (which I'm not sure I understand to be honest - surely websites are by definition "web-centric"?) it's more about being able to match brand fonts. If sites didn't do that they'd end up feeling pretty weird because the crossover of installed desktop fonts is pretty low: http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html (There used to be a better site with fonts listed by what percentage of Windows and MacOS systems had them installed, but the last time I saw it was a while ago and I can't seem to find it again.)

> which I'm not sure I understand to be honest

Uh yeah, I lack sleep. I meant type-centric (such as a newspaper).

> when implemented incorrectly, they massively slow down initial text paint

What are you thinking of in terms of "implemented incorrectly", do you happen to have an example?

I can't recall without looking into it, but there's a lot of gotchas when implementing web fonts. You have to ensure it's using fallbacks, that it can use them before the target fonts have loaded, that the fallbacks are close to the web font in style, and there's a bunch of CSS tricks you can use so that a repaint doesn't end up reflowing everything.

I've sped up sites before by using inline svg rather than icon fonts - downloading an entire icon font for a few icons is inefficient when the actual SVG needed for those icons is < 1Kb and is waaay faster as inline SVG.

Remarkbox does this with the default profile avatar, just-in-time dynamically rendered and inlined SVGs.

I've considered storing each default SVG into the user table and then inlining in the HTML but decided to wait on that optimization since inlining dynamic SVGs itself was such a significant speed boost, especially on threads with hundreds of comments.

Without inlining, each profile image or SVG would be a separate request parallel HTTP request and often at least a couple requests would be slow.

https://www.remarkbox.com

It's only faster on the first load. On all subsequent loads its slower and consumes more bandwidth. I find this irresponsible.

That surely depends on context; for a lot of pages I'll never make a second load at all.

Only if your html is dynamic and can't be cached. I find this irresponsible.

1. If you use, say, 5 icons and there are, say, 250 icons in the full font, then you would need to download the page 50 times to just equal the bandwidth. That's assuming the cache doesn't expire, or it's not an incognito session, or you're not loading it from a CDN where it won't get cached anyway.

2. If you do find this irresponsible, then by all means create a small SVG file with the 5 icons in it and allow that to be cached, or even 5 small individual SVG files if it comes to that.

On multiple projects I've used a tool [1] to closely match a built-in font to a web font in order to present content faster and avoid avoid FOUC (Flash of Unstyled Content/Text). In one case, I replaced webfonts entirely with native platform fonts, purely for speed.

With this approach you can be more practical with your goals. If the design cannot be compromised, you can still get to initial paint quickly and let the WOFF files load in as needed.

Edit: If anyone is looking for more information about this, the post [2] from this tool's author from 2016 does a good job of discussing the tradeoffs.

[1] https://github.com/notwaldorf/font-style-matcher

[2] https://meowni.ca/posts/web-fonts/

Unless your font shares (exactly) metrics with the ones the user has installed there's no way to implement this correctly. This is something you can't know so there's no way to implement this correctly.

In addition, not all users are going to want to use whatever font you (the web designer) decided on. I have my preferred fonts on my system, and I expect my browser to use them. How arrogant of the web developer to override the user's preference!

I remember when the browsers even allowed the user to configure a background image for content. You could have all your web sites render over a tiled picture of a brick wall if you wanted. Year after year, we give up end-user configurability and simply hand it over to nameless web designers who decide what is good for us.

> How arrogant of the web developer to override the user's preference!

I imagine this is partly tongue-in-cheek, but I think the real difficulty here is that CSS doesn't differentiate between "user-configured sans-serif font" and "the system fallback sans-serif font". As a result, you can't allow users to override your font choices without disregarding custom fonts entirely.

Use Stylus, for example I do not like StackOverflow left menu and sticky menu:

    .left-sidebar { display: none }
    #content { width: 100% /* calc(100% - 164px) */ }
 
    .top-bar { display: none }
    body { padding-top: inherit /* 50px */ }

its no script experience cluttered by warning and GDPR consent:

    #noscript-warning { display: none }
    body { margin-top: inherit /* 1.9em */ }

    #js-gdpr-consent-banner { display: none }

Users can extend, overwrite and even discard authors styles, but they have to either understand web layout or use userstyles.org.

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally), and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?).

That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing. But manual font hinting is super expensive, so web fonts don't do it. If you disable them, I'm sure the system has to fall back to the (higher quality) defaults.

Most web fonts are automatically hinted, so they only look acceptable with font smoothing on (at normal font sizes with normal DPIs). If you turn smoothing off, the fonts look super ugly with all kinds of artifacts like weird double-thick lines.

I've tried to disable web fonts because I hate font smoothing (to me it's just blurry, not smooth), but the issue I've run into is the fad of using a custom font for icons, so I end up getting lots of unicode tofu for graphics (e.g. https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/1194628430559469568).

I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants.

It'd be more overhead of course, and basically the opposite of what this thread is about, but it's something I'd be interested in. I'd love to be able to choose a font without things getting mangled.

> I wonder how hard it'd be to create an extension that renders all alphanumeric chars in a font of your choosing, and all other characters in the font the webpage wants.

I'm not too familiar with the details of the icon fonts, but my bet is that most of those characters are in the private use area.

I guess it boils down to if an extension can hook into the font-resolution process, to have different resolution policies for different character ranges. I know there are extensions that can block web fonts, but maybe they just prevent the resource from loading at all.

> That might be due to font hinting. The default fonts (on Windows) were beautifully manually hinted to give a really crisp results without font smoothing.

I used to work at MS, and a lot of people don't realize exactly how much time, money, and love is put into fonts there.

When my team ordered custom fonts, I personally spent a lot of time going over each character pixel by pixel, in combination with many other characters, to make sure everything was perfect. I know other members on my team did the same. It wasn't some sort of mandate, it was just some sort of institutional knowledge, or maybe pride, that Microsoft was paying for custom fonts for our project and we were going to make well sure and good that what we delivered to customers was perfect.

I know there is a holy-war between people who like MacOS's font rendering and people who like Microsoft's font rendering, but I hope everyone can respect the amount of pride that both companies put into their work.

Just want to say that I really appreciate you and people like you. I can spend hours looking over and comparing fonts I use because small problems can really bug me, no pun intended.

Moving to web development was jarring.

Same platform, different browsers, fonts render differently.

Different platform, same browser, fonts render differently.

Same computer, same browser, laptop monitor vs external, fonts render differently.

Same font, same computer, web browser vs local application, fonts render differently.

It is madness.

This is why I still use Word 97 for writing.

The "cleaner" feel may well be to do with better font rendering for desktop fonts, because you'll be using something like TTF rather than WOFF. Web font files have to trade off file size for quality, which desktop fonts don't have to do.

That's not it. WOFF is just a container format for OpenType and TrueType fonts with better compression and some metadata.

WOFF has nothing to do with rendering. You can achieve the exact same rendering with a WOFF file as you can with TTF; the contents are the same.

Well, TIL about it being a container. But do they really contain an identical amount of information for font rendering? I'm no font expert, but I do know that you can have more or less information in a font file that affects how it's rendered.

Yes, it's just an Open Type file. The usual omitted stuff is subsetting a bigger font to include only certain glyphs you need, usually you don't mutilate font by removing rendering data from glyphs.

Yes, it's just a container for the exact same data that an OpenType font holds.

On the other hand, it's possible that in the course of deployment, various things may be dropped from the original font resource: not just subsetting (reducing the repertoire of supported characters), but in some cases also OpenType features (e.g. ligatures or contextual forms), and in some cases hinting is stripped.

If that is done, the webfont version may indeed appear differently than the original "desktop" font, depending on local font-rendering settings.

What lunatic would strip hinting!?

Is this really done?

Yes - after all, it makes the font resource smaller. (And if the designer is working on a Mac, they won't notice any difference.)

Mea culpa, I've done this once before. I work on a small 4k screen so I couldn't tell the difference, though others pointed it out and I fixed it. I was trying to eke out that last bit of performance.

Both Firefox and Chrome use their own font rendering, regardless of whether you're using system fonts or not.

Categorically not true in Firefox in default settings, usually disabled by websites in Chrome by using the CSS property "text-rendering: optimizeLegibility" (unless you are somehow in macOS which in this case the default preference is to optimize for precision systemwide anyway).

Most free fonts are rather poor quality. Most font designers seem to publish web fonts for free as an advertisement for their services or print font products they sell. As a consequence, while the sample sentence might look great, the feeling when reading is poor. Especially screen optimisation is lacking, which is what distinguishes the usual fonts you get with your OS (like Arial or Roboto) from stuff you would buy for print (like Helvetica). Also, people tend to pick more fancy fonts to set themselves apart, which of course decreases readability even with very good fonts: you can just read fonts faster if you are used to them, uncommon ones slow you down and feel uncomfortable for long texts.

Font designers publish poor quality fonts to promote their products? That isn't supposed to work.

You’re underestimating how much work and skill it takes to make a good font, even for a great designer, so type foundries like to lock good fonts up behind rent-seeking license agreements.

Selling fonts is not rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking would be if Google demanded money from a font designer to let their fonts be "compatible" with Chrome. I.e. Pay me or I'll make sure your product doesn't work with my product. App stores is a common example; pay Apple or they'll make sure your software doesn't run on the iPhone.

Those fonts are never simply "sold".

The most usual is that you'll have to pay a certain price up-front (or monthly), and some more for each access. The odds are also good that you won't be able to host the font yourself, because well, the foundry has to count those access, doesn't it? And if you want the foundry to respond any quickly, you better pay some extra.

Some features of the license agreement are though.

For example, some foundries require you buy a special expensive license in order to use their fonts in a PDF. IIRC, Hoefler & Co. and Emigre do this (though it's been years since I've looked, so I may have changed this). Their rationale is that since it's possible to extract font from a PDF, they need to pay for any font piracy that results from that.

(never mind that anyone who wants to pirate the font would just go and find a torrent instead of ripping it out of a PDF... and there are torrents of every notable foundry's entire libraries)

You may not like it, neither do I. But what you have there is just rent plain and simple, not rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is when a third party uses force to claim profit from an agreement they're not actually party to.

For example, you rent a business property. You pay the landlord and agree to their terms. Next week the mob shows up and demand protection money to "keep you from harm". Implying that harm will surely come to you unless you pay. That's rent-seeking.

The app store analogy fits rather nicely I think, but it depends on your viewpoint.

> Rent-seeking is when a third party uses force to claim profit from an agreement they're not actually party to.

The agreement is between you and the law in most countries, which says that typefaces are exempt from copyright. The third party are foundries who license fonts to you and charge you more based on how popular your website is.

A typeface is an artistic work and as such is certainly covered by copyright in "most countries". If they were not then why would license agreements even be a thing.

If you don't wish to agree to the license terms of a particular typeface, you have the option to choose another typeface instead. This includes the myriad free typefaces that exist today.

If you buy something from me or strike a license agreement with me, I'm not a "third party" to that transaction.

There is literally an exception in US and other countries’ copyright law just for typefaces.

> If they were not then why would license agreements even be a thing.

We could make a license agreement that you pay me per breathe of air you take. It’s not my fault if you sign that.

The problem isn't designers who need of course compensation for their work, but building up an e-commerce stack, per-volume licensing infra, and publicity, leading to "platforms", verticals, concentration, and most commercial fonts being distributed by just two companies (Adobe and Monotype). In other words, middle-men taking all the money away, when easy self-publishing was the entire point of the web.

(Though I've heard Adobe Stock and iStock at least works ok for photographers and graphic artists for now)

How is charging for a font rent seeking?

It isn’t :)

It's rent-seeking if, instead of selling you the font once under a mutually agreeable license, they charge you an ongoing fee to "use" the font under conditions that the foundry controls and can change without re-negotiating the contract. This is especially true if the condition are "you can use for purposes x, y, and z, but if you want to use it for a, b, or c you have to pay a higher rate".

How can they charge you if you don’t agree to the contract?

What do you mean? If you agree to the contract when you rented access to the font, you're subject to all its conditions. If you don't want to pay the additional rent, your choice is to break the contract and lose access to the font, or pay up.

Maybe it does. It isn't poor quality per se, on the first contact those fonts look great. Only prolonged usage will reveal their flaws, and then only if you know what you are looking for. Most buyers won't be so sophisticated, so it can work. Actually, lots and lots of products are sold in such a superficial way.

I'm not surprised at all that it works, I just think something must be broken if it does.

The cleaner look is because most designers use macOS which renders most fonts in a way that makes them all look good (let’s not get into technical details). On Windows the same fonts might look like shit (for example some parts of a character are thicker than the rest for no apparent reason)

Well, good is relative. MacOS renders fonts in a weight-and-form-correct way which makes them look blurry however. Windows renders fonts in a weight-and-form-incorrect way, which however makes them sharper and easier to read on screens, especially with resolutions below 200dpi.

Now if you use a high-resolution monitor and print-optimized fonts, MacOS will look better. If you use a low-resolution monitor and screen-optimized fonts, Windows will look better. Problem is, most designers come from print and use expensive Mac gear, so they are designing for a minority, their peers, not their users.

Designers primarily designing for other designers is a core problem with the entire field of design and it holds back a lot of society as it seems to really encourage apps having super low information density displays with slow animations.

> Problem is, most designers come from print and use

This can't still be true. No one comes from print anymore.

> This can't still be true. No one comes from print anymore.

It is. The real problem is that a large number of designers like to have a pixel-perfect experience (which on print doesn't really matter as they know what paper will that publication use).

MacOS makes text blurry. You need a high resolution monitor for macOS font rendering to be acceptable.

Like the one that comes with my laptop or is sold by apple?

I think macOS will always be optimised for the best experience. Even if that means sub par XP if you don’t go all in on money.

I’d actually be interested in learning more about the rendering vs say windows if you have a source.

> I think macOS will always be optimised for the best experience.

It is probably better to say that Apple will design for their intended market. I was using Apple products long before HiDPI was a thing and was never particularly happy with the fuzzy fonts under Mac OS X. While that may be acceptable when designing for print, since accuracy is more important, it is an annoyance in many other circumstances.

Blurry on standard-resolution monitors.

On hi-def monitors and laser-printed page, it is lovely both to read and to look at.

I mean, 4K (3840×2160) 23" displays nowadays start at $300, so if you’re still on hundred-buck 1920x1080 then you’re only getting what you paid for.

Going to all hi-def displays is the single best investment I ever made as a professional programmer, reading and writing text on screens daily.

Its actually incredible how ugly fonts render on windows. After using linux for so long I thought I was experiencing a bug when seeing fonts on windows.

Have you got a screenshot? I'm curious as I regularly switch between Windows and MacOS and I'm happy enough with font rendering on both.

In my recollection (and it's been a few years since I used a Linux GUI) Linux was the one with dodgy font rendering.

We probably get used to whatever font rendering the systems we use the most have.

To me, fonts indeed look blurry on macOS and weird on Windows. Screenshots from Windows with colored pixels particularly don't look good to me. Though after having seen screens of people using Windows 10, it seems they changed whatever I really didn't like about font rendering on Windows.

I still like font rendering on GNU/Linux (and Android) better it is correctly configured, which it is on widespread distributions with widespread desktop environments (I use a QHD screen). But it could be out of habit. On some configurations, kerning is bad though.

Perhaps the screenshots you're seeing have ClearType (i.e. sub-pixel anti-aliasing) turned on, and when it got to you (as a picture) the subpixels no longer match on your screen? For example, if one of the screens involved was vertically oriented…

This is it. This was more of an aside, it's indeed not supposed to look this way when it's directly rendered on the screen.

Cleartype is an acquired taste :P

Don't tell people this, they'll start making larger fonts.

Have you tried something like uMatrix? If you use it in the denylisting mode, it doesn't seem to impact much on my web browsing experience. By default it is in allowlist mode, which means it's speedy to open pages, but you run into trouble quite quickly. I really can't stand browsing the web without it.

What is the maintenance status of uMatrix? I haven't checked recently, my most up to date info is that Gorhill left it due to too many bogus issues filed on Github.

Just use uBlock Origin.

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

Not nearly as good.

It works, I assume there would be forks if needed.

You'll find that disabling images over 50KB has a similar effect, as does disabling all third-party JS except for a select few CDNs if you're lazy. In the end it's three parts performance to one part online safety.

A well-designed web page does not rely on custom fonts, unless it is necessary to render a non-standard script.

Tufte would disagree, and at least some consider his thoughts on design to be very solid.

Would you be amenable to "A well-designed web page does not need to rely on custom fonts, provided their impact on page load is absolutely minimal"?

You can unobtrusively serve up a single font embedded as base64 on a static site - a world of difference from some of these sites that load up 5MB of a UX person's vision off some remote CDN.

> I've been experimenting with having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally

How do you do this exactly?

An easy way is enabling "Block remote fonts" in uBlock Origin's settings

You could add a filter like `*$font,third-party` or similar as well

I did an experiment a few months ago where I just switched of font overrides and set my default font to Comic Sans, at a pretty large default size (and I tend to zoom in a lot, too).

It actually was quite pleasant and readable, despite the particular font choice.

Comic sans has a lot of space between letters which tens to make it more readable. It’s one of the reasons it’s so popular with schools and kids.

> having custom fonts disabled (that is, fonts I don't have locally)

Safari prevents website from using local fonts. Only web fonts.

The thought is that a site could check which fonts work for you based on local fonts and use that towards your marketing thumbprint.

As a guy who does this blocking pretty ruthlessly (edit: inc. cookies), I'd like to understand why - I don't take offence at 'sneer', ISWYM but I'd like to understand the other side of the fence. TIA

sorry, 'sneer' is probably a bit strong - it's really just a lack of understanding on my part (of your side of the fence).

I personally find browsing the internet without javascript or cookies enabled by default to be incredibly frustrating/inconvenient, but I'm sure it's all very subjective, down to your own personal browsing habits.

Thanks, and I understood the word was used for dramatic effect only.

From my POV I too find it frustrating at times, but I'd say much of that comes quite unnecessarily not from JS use, but its abuse, eg. fails to display text unless JS is enabled. HTML is pretty good at that!

There's no point me boring you with all the plusses of not using js (just ask) but speed... once a connection is made this http://antirez.com/latest/0 is pretty much instantaneous.

(thanks for your reply)

Overcoming frustration regarding ads, performance, nag screen, consent screens, poor design, various hijacking, tracking, clickbait and otherwise poor content is very personal in my experience.

Some people even invent new protocols (Gemini comes to mind) to circumvent some of these frustrations.

I found it frustrating and inconvenient at first. Now when I try to use a browser w/ default Javascript settings I find that I'm even more frustrated than when I started using NoScript. Websites left to their own devices to run arbitrary code on my machine are almost universally terrible to use. Local news sites are, by far, the worst. Lots of sites are terrible though.

So true! So many sites use those icons/symbols in the nav etc so their sites end up broken without web fonts. Other than that, it feels so much better and faster blocking web fonts.

I've had this as well for quite some time in uBlock Origin - and it works great. Most websites don't need custom fonts, and uBO remembers the ones where I re-enable them back.

Fonts are large assets (often larger than a full bleed banner image), so they do add to page weight. They also “swap” by default, replacing a local font after loading, which adds to the perceptible load time. There are other techniques that may feel different depending on usage but unfortunately there’s no silver bullet.

My favourites are sites that load the layout, the ads, the analytics, then the fonts and only then the actual text of the page. If the font doesn’t load, the text doesn’t load — and if you have JavaScript turned off just a blank layout with ad-sized blocks waiting for something to happen.

I tend to disable page fonts and use my own selection instead because I prefer to have anti-aliasing off. Fonts that were designed before cleartype look great with AA off but cleartype fonts usually look awful with AA off because of the lack of hinting.

why do you prefer to have anti-aliasing off? what sort of monitor do you use?

I have a regular 16:9 monitor, 2048x1152, in which I have Windows font scaling set at 150%.

The reason I prefer AA off (with fonts that were designed for it like Verdana or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) is because I find it less tiring on the eyes. With AA off, the edges are all sharp and crisp, there's no blurriness. It looks closer to print. When AA is on, they look smeared and don't have clearly defined edges.

What is also a puzzler, as displays become increasingly higher resolution, now 4K and heading toward 8K, the need for AA is supposed to disappear. You don't need to fake smoothness at high pixel resolutions, yet many OSes are actually now making it harder to turn AA off.

It gets dumber.. OSes that used RGB subpixel AA (cleartype) because they're now on tablets and other devices that rotate, they can't count on the RGB stripe, so they stopped using RGB subpixel AA and went back to greyscale AA.

They are. And it is noticeable on old/slow computers. For example comparing bootstrap 2 (which uses image icons) to bootstrap 3.

On the other hand, android has only one system font, Roboto, which kind of necessitates using external fonts

I have most blocked as well through my ad blockers. The biggest annoyance is when they use fonts for icons instead of images. I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious.

> I’m not sure where that trend comes from, but it’s obnoxious.

(1) The options for controlling the style of SVG elements (e.g. on hover) are not great.[0] In contrast, font icons can be styled as easily as any other text.

(2) Font files are usually smaller than their SVG counterparts.

(3) Font rendering is faster than SVG rendering.

(4) IE did not support SVG until version 9, but supported custom fonts since version 5.

(5) Old browsers that did support SVG had serious issues with SVG sprite maps, ranging from creating duplicate rasterisations of the entire SVG file in memory for every use of the same file in a document, to not caching the rasters at all and regenerating them every time they needed to be repainted (e.g. during scrolling). These are fixed now, but inertia is what it is.

[0] https://css-tricks.com/change-color-of-svg-on-hover/

How does one do this for chrome/firefox? Google search gives result for the opposite problem.

firefox

options -> language and appearance -> advanced -> uncheck 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above'

Won't this break the UI of most sites because they (ab)use web fonts to add icons?

It's annoying to hit a page with a video player, and all the buttons are little boxes with numbers in them because the icon font didn't load...

for me personally, I've only noticed this problem once, but I can't remember which site that was (must be one I don't visit often), but obviously your browsing habits are different to mine.

I don't see any disadvantages to giving it a try yourself for a while tho' - it's just a single checkbox setting.

I have tried it with uBlock (not Firefox's native setting), and it breaks a ton of mainstream sites.

“No web fonts for elements containing multiple characters” would be a great ublock rule, now I think about it...

That'd break sites that use ligature-based icon fonts, with the actual content being an icon identifier like "thumbs-up" and an OpenType ligature rule in the font to render this as an icon glyph.

Could you just get the icon name in that case? For me it would be good-enough, or, in many cases, better than the crammed design-first icons (Slack, I'm pointing at you!).

In theory, it's legible; but often, rendering the icon name (which may be up to a dozen letters or so) will totally break a layout that was designed to accommodate a single glyph.

Ahh good point. Not sure if I have seen one of those used before; they seem to have a good fallback though.

It depends.

In Firefox, disabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" does not completely block web fonts (as setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false would); what it does is to prioritise the default fonts, and move any page-specified fonts to the end of the fallback list.

This means that for "normal" text, the browser's default fonts will be used, but if there are Private Use Area character codes that are only supported by the site's custom webfont, it'll still get used for those. So icon fonts that are based on PUA code points will still work.

What doesn't work in this scenario is when the icon font doesn't encode its icons in the PUA, but uses normal Unicode characters -- either symbol code points that are supported by the system's default fonts, or as some icon fonts do, regular English words that then use ligature rules to produce the icon glyphs. (So the icon font contains OpenType mappings such as "phone" -> [phone icon].) In this case the content on the page will end up rendered using the default font instead.

[Edited: HN doesn't let me include an actual phone icon there, apparently.]

Very few sites do this, in my experience.

In Firefox, setting gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false seems to do the trick. You can verify by visiting https://fonts.google.com/, which looks a bit dull after disabling.

This worked for me on Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25305835

For me it was some ubuntu site that used such a crooked font my eyes hurt when I saw it.

That's a MAJOR hit to design and branding for a very small hit in page weight. Properly configured webfonts add almost nothing at all. There may be more business value in the 500ms you save vs branding (absolutely possible) but it's a tradeoff.

> and it feels to me that page loads are much faster, and in some case more readable (pages feel 'cleaner'?)

More readable, and also helps one focus on the content. A lot of web publications with literary pretensions (New Yorker, Quillette, LRB …) use pretty classic-looking externally loaded serif fonts for their articles, which not only slows down reading but can also (IMO) make one less critical of the content than one otherwise would be.

If I were the editors of these magazines I would be seriously tempted to force the use of Comic Sans for all article content. May not be good from advertising point of view but it signals a kind of intellectual honesty that I suspect is valued higher by their readership than a "classic look"

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