Of course, there’s always the tracking ability, but that’s inherent to every CDN.
> 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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also I doubt there are many people reading the web on 2004 netbooks. You know what I am talking about.
2. I used a small 2007 laptop well in to 2018, and I believe that the software I wrote was better for it.
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.
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.
Bundling with browsers outside of Chrome would be a different story, but Google has no say over that anyways.
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.
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.