Omg just disabling custom fonts in Firefox speeds up the internet so much!
Someone should invent an HTML tag for putting images on a page.
When I was implementing this, I initially experimented with the img tags – easy to implement, easy to have multi-color icons. But the grid can potentially have 100s of rows, potentially resulting in 1000+ of img tags. When testing with img tags, my site became noticeably sluggish (on a quick desktop PC). With icon fonts, the icon grid is basically lines of text, and the browser can render it with no noticeable performance impact.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37940282/changing-the-st...
But the "wrong tool for the job" point still stands, users with custom fonts disabled (for performance or accessibility reasons) will not be able to see your icons.
Why not? I don't know, you're asking the wrong person, I use a CSS font too. My reasons are (a) last time I looked into putting SVGs into a sprite-map to avoid 1000 HTTP requests it was a shitshow (not well supported), and (b) Chrome and other browsers would sometimes align the SVG on a half-pixel causes the edges to be a little blurry, whereas fonts get special treatment to ensure they are crisp. That was years ago tho.
The only annoying thing about turning off fonts is the weird settings ProtonMail and GitHub use.
For others wondering how:
about:config
gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled (set to to FALSE)