I have had the exact experience in the last month. Being on a slow connection, I've come to loath web fonts. There is nothing wrong with them in general but it's just that they've come to symbolise over-indulgence and a myopia towards the users actual task-focused needs as opposed to aesthetics.
Part of the issue is dealing with progressive enhancement as far as slow internet connections go. How do you solve that problem? There is no native browser API to my knowledge that does not depend on using JS which isn't ideal imo.
Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.
P.S
Would also encourage those who have the choice to use system fonts (https://medium.design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f) instead of web fonts. Seems more in-line with the spirit of the web and these fonts are very well tested in general.
As much as I believe font matters, I really think people should just use system fonts in general. No content is definitely more annoying than ugly content, but I have a seething hatred for webpages who jump around as content loads. "Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!"
Besides, I'm used to my fonts. I know your fonts are a deliberate design choice, but I'm here for content. Maybe I'm just a neophyte, because I think a smaller cleaner website is better than a reactive design that has to constantly change to cram everything in. I don't care though, it's stupid when I have to wait 10 seconds for a page to load on my home connection because you've got so much crap going on, and all the while the content is jumping around like a frog with it's butt on fire.
If your site sucks, I'm not going to whine about it on twitter, I'm just going to stop visiting.
"Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!"
This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but rather when I load reddit on my phone, a "get the reddit app" banner appears... timed perfectly so that my attempt to view my messages sends me off to the app store.
Heck, this is my #1 complaint of almost anything on a mobile browser. It's easily the worst offender when it comes to mobile in general; I wish browser vendors put a bigger focus on fixing this, somehow.
Didn't this start on the desktop and now because companies think it was successful on desktops, they need to extend it to mobile since they think everyone has 4G service?
I remember when your mobile experience was supposed to be a stripped down faster version of your desktop version. Now, they're both insanely hard to navigate and use.
I used to get the mobile versions of pages on the desktop. Not because I was on a slow connection, just because the text is the meat for most things on the Internet. Now there's less of a point in doing that.
Google also has tech to show these banners but only if you've visited the same site a few times already, and then not every time. (This link talks about web app installs first, then native app installs later)
So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...
Exactly. They're masters of subtlety, manipulating our species to evolve in just the right way, learn just the right things. We don't experiment on them so much as they experiment on us.
What a great example of really bad webfont. That page almost broke my eyes, when saving island of bold fb comments came to the rescue. People lost in thin-line madness.
I'm starting to suspect that behavior is intentional. I see this all the time with mobile ads... a site slowly loads as I read content, then an ad pops up right when I try to navigate. Incredibly frustrating.
It's like advertisers want me to install adblock... so I will, I'll root my device and adblock all their bullshit forever.
That's so annoying. Worst thing is that adblocks are not as easily available as in desktops. I'm on windows phone 10, my only browser is Edge, so I'm really fucked.
Thanks for the suggestion, but it doesn't seem good for me. Blocking things at DNS level, can be counterproductive. Maybe there's a false positive that's been blocked and it will probably a headache to find it.
It's pretty easy to whitelist a whole domain... the domains on the lists are pretty comprehensively ad-related. Your call, but it certainly is one solution.
Best suggestion I've seen on this: click events apply to whatever had been in the location ~300ms BEFORE you selected it. Turns out humans can't respond much more quickly than that.
I wish I could credit the source but I don't recall -- HN or Reddit probably.
I'm also still not sure this solves the full problem. On mobile, there's generally the problem that a touch and a drag are two different actions, but they're not clearly distinguished. There's a tremendous amount of ambiguity over just where you can or cannot touch on a given web page to accomplish a click, and increasingly pages have very few "safe" whitespace zones.
Examples coming to mind: Chrome/Android history -- the delete-item 'x' will also open the link in the current browser tab. I've found clearing history to be tedious (there's no way to select multiple items, or a date range, say -- you can only delete items one-at-a-time, and not too fast...). On YouTube/Mobile, the entire panel of a search result is a clickable zone, making scrolling the page without inadvertently opening a video you're not interested in all but impossible.
I'm convinced this page-jumps-as-you're-about-to-touch is a dark pattern to some clickbait time-waster sites use to get more mobile ad clicks. Just when I'm about to click 'Next' to see the 7th-of-53 stoopid-photos-taken-at-Walmart an ad link jumps to be right under my finger.
This even happens on Youtube, on a 200 mbit+ connection - I go to a page, and just as I reach over to click a link some stylesheet finally shows up and everything moves up by twenty pixels.
Same thing with the Facebook app; whenever you're searching for something, it shows the result you want, but then like 0.5-1 second later it pops up a different result above it so you tap the wrong thing. Drives me insane.
There's an option to open the website in external browser, chrome tab or internal browser. Not only in Reddit Sync (which is great), but in every other Reddit app as well.
Btw, opening the website in the Chrome tab is basically the same (session state, cookies are same) as opening it in Chrome, it's just way faster - specially on RAM challenged devices.
My experience has been web designers are strongly in either the "system fonts are an abomination before God" camp, or the "the user picked the system fonts, lets use those." camp. Oddly pulling them from one camp into the other seems very very difficult.
I generally prefer a specific font, but will fallback to sans-serif, serif or monospace depending on what I'm styling... I also tend not to have a bunch of fallthrough fonts... ex: specifying helvetica and/or arial should be an offense punishable by a mild beating.
Another thing I hate is when people don't specify the weight for black/bold fonts... which makes the fallback even more hideous.
What happens when a user makes their system font esoteric-new-age-web-sans-font-#523626263278 and your page and the system itself are using the same font?
Typical users vomit and faint when they see text set in Tahoma that was clearly meant for Helvetica, or when a paragraph is one line taller or shorter than the one and only official layout.
Telepathic sensitivity to designer intent is extremely common! Don't let elastic, robust CSS layout techniques mess with your pixel-perfect templates!
> I know your fonts are a deliberate design choice, but I'm here for content.
Categorizing type as "a design choice" dismisses it as fashion rather than function, which I don't think is the case. Type can put fashion over function, but it can also enhance function by making text more readable, or perform a mix of both functions by expressing a point visually that reinforces the point the page is making textually. It is possible to remove meaning from a document by stripping away design.
> Maybe I'm just a neophyte, because I think a smaller cleaner website is better than a reactive design that has to constantly change to cram everything in
Responsive design and web fonts are different issues; you can use Web fonts on a page without any responsive design elements, and vice versa.
> I don't care though, it's stupid when I have to wait 10 seconds for a page to load on my home connection because you've got so much crap going on, and all the while the content is jumping around like a frog with it's butt on fire.
This is a real problem, but it has much less to do with either responsive design or Web fonts than with the absolute crap-ton of JavaScript sites lard themselves down with these days to do things like load ads (which is what causes all that jumping around, as slow-loading ad units pop into place and the document has to re-flow everything else to accommodate them). Try turning JavaScript off in your browser some time and you will see this immediately.
Here's an example: I was just on Rotten Tomatoes (which uses Web fonts), and was getting annoyed by precisely the kind of spastic layout you rightly decry. As an experiment, I tried loading the home page from a cold cache with JavaScript on, and then again with it off. With scripts on, it took more than 12 seconds for the page to finish loading. Without scripts: under 1 second.
> Categorizing type as "a design choice" dismisses it as fashion rather than function, which I don't think is the case.
I think it's a question of how often it's one vs. the other. There are precious few good examples of web font usage -- so few, in fact, that I can't even think of one off the top of my head.
> Type can put fashion over function, but it can also enhance function by making text more readable,
How so? I mean, I've literally chosen my system fonts based on readability (to me, on my screen, with my eyesight, with my lighting conditions, etc!). I'm also used to those fonts.
> [...] by expressing a point visually that reinforces the point the page is making textually
Do you have any good examples of this? I don't think I've ever seen it "in the wild", so to speak.
Disclosure: I'm so annoyed by web fonts that I use a browser plugin which actually overrides fonts chosen by web pages, so I may not have been experiencing a representative sample of "what's out there". I had to have a quick-toggle for that plugin because suddenly it became fashionable to use goddamn fonts for icons. Ugh. Don't get me started :).
I make my own "enhancement suite" for any website I frequent. I blacklist all Javascript by default and whitelist only Javascript necessary for things to function. I use Greasemonkey to add my own functionality to a page, sometimes blacklisting the "default" functionality and rolling my own code to replace it in a more "me-friendly" way. And finally, Stylish, so that I can completely nuke the site's CSS and roll out my own.
But most users won't go through that. They'll use the default browser font and never change it.
Corporate doesn't want to use Arial on the site, so we have a problem with the browser default. Luckily the designer has threatened to quit before they use Comic Sans. At best, they'll pick a nice legible font and at worst they'll pick something "aesthetic" that may be a pain in the ass to read. Usually you get somewhere in the middle or a (sans-)serif font from Google Fonts.
Once upon a time I could trick corporate into using Helvetica, but it seems to have "fallen out of fashion". They don't actually look at the font, they just know what they "don't want" and what they "don't want" is Arial.
>Would it be feasible to have an "enhancement pack" website where less talented people (ie me) could get fixes like this.
Sort of? At least if I'm understanding you properly. :)
It used to be that userscripts.org was a thing. Now I think you need to use a mirror [0]. There is also a subreddit for them [1]. Stylish should have a similar site for themes - although not all userscripts will work properly with Stylish (styles may break functionality that relies on styles being a certain way).
For a few sites, I think people have made "generators" for stylesheets to make it user-friendly to generate your own userstyle. I'm not aware of any offhand though.
It would be nice to have a more "curated" or organized Userscripts site, since not all of them are site-specific.
The two most popular "enhancement suites" are the Youtube Enhancement Suite and the Reddit Enhancement Suite, both of which do countless things and are extremely "heavyweight" in functionality/features. My personal "enhancement suites" are a lot smaller in scale and public usability. :)
For some sites I use a lot I do this as well. Mostly CSS fixes, for example widening GitHub's layout to some 1300px. But also removing annoying "design-crap", substituting fonts etc.
https://www.wired.com is excellent in how they use fonts to subtly indicate importance/recency/category.
Many newspapers use fonts very consciously, which usually has the effect that it doesn't enter the reader's consciousness. It's a subtle cue indicating the brand and the image it wants to project. oCmpare the NYT and the Economist – they aim to reach almost identical populations, but the NYT uses serifs (tradition, dependence, gravity) vs. the Econmist's sans (modern, fast, business).
>> > Type can put fashion over function, but it can also enhance function by making text more readable,
How so? I mean, I've literally chosen my system fonts based on readability (to me, on my screen, with my eyesight, with my lighting conditions, etc!). I'm also used to those fonts.
Oh come on, the "designer" knows what's best for you. ;-) I was going to make a similar response, but you beat me so sarcasm.
Designers don't typically design for people who change their default fonts because most people don't know how and on some platforms it's not even possible.
Most people don't adjust their system fonts.. then again, most defaults are reasonable.
And to anyone who reads this, for the love of $deity, stop specifying Arial or Helvetica before sans-serif. It's one thing if you want a specific default, but the fallback should be whatever system's sane choice.
The default system fonts are more than good enough for just about any webpage. If Aerial were the only font web browsers were allowed to display, the world would go on just as productively, aside from some designers who conditioned themselves to believe they don't like looking at it getting upset.
Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?
Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.
If macOS, Windows, Debian, iOS, and Android all came with Roboto, Source Sans, Lato, Merriweather, Raleway, etc. pre-installed, then we could make the case that if we used those fonts instead of non-free ones we would have consistency across all platforms and better performance for our users.
Since I doubt that day will ever come, we instead need to weigh an inconsistent appearance against a poor experience for those on slow connections. Different organizations will choose to prioritize different things, and that's ok.
A significant portion of marketers and designers will always demand pixel perfection for their websites. I'm just glad we're not putting text inside of images any more.
This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium.
They'll sit lovingly with a bunch of dinged up old lead typesetting tools, positively jizz over imperfections in ink distribution, but try to talk to them about system fonts, box models, or free phones and their eyes glaze over and they drift off into their color calibrated RAW dreamland.
In schools they teach people to embrace media but that only applies to fetishized antique media.
They'll use half of the GPU to render CRT glow too, with 8-bit graphics, gush about material metaphors in their visual design, but they won't consider the material properties of the actual distribution medium for their work.
We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age. Maybe very briefly for a year or two in the nineties when browsers were good enough to be interesting but not good enough to do anyrhing. It'll come eventually, but it's taking its sweet time.
This is a completely unrealistic view of how designers work.
I've yet to meet a web designer who would have the first clue what to do with hot metal. There are some old guys who remember physical typesetting for print, but design has been primarily electronic for around twenty years now.
The history of the web started after most print had already moved to digital fonts and layout with Pagemaker, then Quark Xpress.
It's one of the tragedies of browser development that it took the web 15 years to start to catch up with industry standard page layout possibilities, and another 5 years to start dealing with fonts intelligently.
And the web - frankly - still sucks for this kind of work. It's not that responsive design is harder than print, it's more that from a designer's POV CSS has been a train wreck for most of its history.
I understand some people here want their own font stylings, and that's fine. But designers use fonts for a reason, and "Not invented here because I don't like this" isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for them to do that.
That's exactly my point. You are unwilling to accept the properties of your medium. You just say "it sucks" and fight with it. You're like an acrylic painter who complains that oil dries slowly and keeps designing for acrylics, and everything comes out smudgy.
> This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium.
That seems a bit harsh. If anything, I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts. Speakers[0] at An Event Apart spoke of the web as a fluid continuum, so even the idea of designing for only mobile and desktop is insufficient these days (especially with all the varying device sizes).
If you're working with any designer that still expects pixel perfection, I'd suggest that they attend An Event Apart conference, or at least read a few articles on A List Apart.
"I feel like the old static print mindset is on its way out and designers have been leaning towards the web as a medium with dynamic layouts."
I want to believe you, but I feel like the sheer number of designers who whine about GIMP's lack of CMYK support in their justifications for using Photoshop instead (nevermind that pretty much all modern display technology is RGB-centric) suggests otherwise.
I can understand thinking in a CMYK mindset and not wanting to have to think about RGB, but that nonetheless suggests an unwillingness to change one's mindset to adapt to current media.
Still doesn't solve the bigger problem - that neither designers nor publishers actually embraced the digital medium. They've been treating the web as if it was a poster - something for the designers to show off on. The only thing the current "responsive design" fad brought up is that the poster now changes its layout with size in a somewhat intelligent manner. But they're still drawing posters. We're still getting only text + pictures + occasional video. What about interactive descriptions? Embedded simulations? Models that we can explore, or play with? Nowhere to be found, except in occasional essay by Bret Victor.
That's because up until recently, the only tools users have to interact have been 2D. If 3D becomes a thing, more designers will embrace it and think of new ways to communicate ideas in that space.
Also, in a discussion about communicating efficiently over limited bandwidth, and the possibility removing web fonts, 3D spaces is in a completely opposite direction. We'd have to load vector files and texture maps so that the 3D space doesn't look like crap.
Also, there's a limit to how much input a human can process. There's a reason why certain sites have gotten more simple to restrict distractions.
>We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age.
But we have -- unified design guidelines like Metro and Material Design ARE modernist design movements for the era of displays and interactive media. Just because it only applies for an Operating System or an Application doesn't make it any different than using cut-out colors or Gotham in your print ad.
> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?
> Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts.
This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're stuck with unreasonable people.
Not only is 80char more readable, as a sibling comment said, but it also allows addition pieces of code to be displayed side-by-side on a laptop screen.
To be fair, 120char wide code is also not too bad for this purpose and readability.
132 column displays were common by the end of the 1970s.
80 column displays date back to the early 1970s.
I started coding on an 80 column display, and I have no doubt at all that a modern 16:9 monitor that can display a double page PDF or a web page with a variety of fonts is a much better display device.
It sounds like that was the limit they could fit in the available space given the technology (earlier versions had fewer columns, the "upgrade" to 80 was based on using new narrower holes) - the width was set by wanting to match existing infrastructure for money.
Isn't it more so it is readable inside a phone display to an ssh session as well as a fat 4K screen? That's my reason at least. Can always scale up something, but line breaks I didn't make myself make me want to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of a demonic deity taking the earthly form of a little girl. Or, you know, angry.
I'm one of those people, though my reason is more so that I can fit more code windows side-by-side (especially on a system with a tiling window manager, like the laptop on which I'm typing this comment) and not have to deal with horizontal scrolling or weird word wrapping that's out of my control.
It also helps to keep my code readable; the shorter the line, the quicker I can work out what exactly that line happens to do. In the vast majority of cases, an inability to keep a line within 72 characters is a line that needs refactored.
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do.
Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.
That's not really true. They won't consciously believe that, but they won't use the technically superior product, if the competitor has the basics and a better design.
I think that designers are always trying to get the latest, coolest fonts. If you make Roboto and friends part of the OS, then you'll get a new wave of cool new fonts that aren't a part of the OS. There's always a push from people to have their website look special, and, dare I say it, pop.
There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere.
Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."
Why can't we just deal with the fact that different devices will display your content differently? The world doesn't need better fonts, the world needs better designers.
> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)?
Yeah, I have. In the 90ies. Saying that it's a reason for any designer of any website that matters today is just trying to set up a strawman.
I was just going to say that Medium post about the system fonts was a great read and deserves a thread of its own, but it looks there there was one a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10437485
> Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.
Takes me back to the days when you would choose between an HTML version of a site, or a heavy Flash version. :)
Yes! Why should a web site specify fonts at all? The user should set their browser to a default that they like and most sites should be happy with that. People just use web fonts because they can. If there's a particular reason you need to override the users preference then fine.
> The user should set their browser to a default that they like
If this was actually a decent part of a browser's configuration UI, it might have caught on (or... still might). Give people tools to manage this easily, and they may choose to do it - the 'reader mode' in some browsers shows some people want to get at content regardless of fonts, and giving them easier and more 'up-front' ways of managing this would bring the issue front and center.
Why did we end up with legislation about cookies? I think, in part, it's because it was essentially black magic for years, hidden in layers of nested "advanced" menus, instead of a button right in the damn menu bar saying "clear cookies".
"Why doesn't anyone use personal certificates?!" (I hear from tech colleagues now and then) - because the UI/management for it is horribly useless for 99% of people.
Same with this font stuff. Put "font choice" front and center, as part of browser setup - don't hide it behind layers of "accessibility" stuff. Give people some standard themes they can switch between easily - high contrast, B&W, etc - and have it be something that's a button press away (harder to do on mobile, I'd think).
Because font choice can communicate a lot. Font choice can establish a brand, font choice can create a mood.
Web fonts are better than the stuff people did to do this in the old days. Crazy abominations like siFR [1] or rendering out a gif of your text and using that instead of just delivering some ASCII text that screenreaders can deal with? Web fonts aren't perfect, especially on slow connections, but they're the least horrible solution we have for people who would like to control the finer aesthetic details of how their sites look.
Come to think of it, browsers could have a mode where they use only installed fonts regardless of what a site says. This would be useful to the people on slow connections.
Firefox supports this. In Firefox on Android, it's visible in the settings (under "data saving"). Not sure if it's surfaced in desktop, or only in about:config.
And why should anyone be allowed to set colors, or sizes, or shapes? Why don't we use .txt as the format for the web?
Because design happens to be one avenue of human expression. If you keep denying that, or label users enjoying it as superficial, you'll end up with something like North Korea, where everyone gets to choose from two approved hairstyles, walks around in "male shoe" or "female shoe" and goes home to eat soylent.
The whole point of HTML was that the layout was done by the browser to fit the users screen. If your site is fixed width, you're doing it wrong. And I realize that a lot of places are doing it wrong.
I keep external fonts disabled on my laptop with Firefox. Under Preferences > Content > Advanced, uncheck "Allow Pages to User Their Own Fonts", and it makes the web seemingly twice as fast.
Why can't we share fonts between websites? I.e., put fonts on some shared CDN, and link to them directly. It could be similar to how different programs share code through shared-object files :)
A similar effect will probably be achieved with IPFS, where objects are stored by their hashes.
I have this exact issue with web fonts. One neat trick I discovered on slow/flaky connections (think train passing through countryside) is that you can read the page quickly by going into iOS Safari's Reader View. It's a bit hit-and-miss though.
As a web author though, a big problem I have is that Android's default font set is pretty ugly, which is a big reason site owners want web fonts in the first place. Both Windows and macOS have a decent bundle of fonts. Android has Roboto, but using just Roboto for everything is a drag. And I'm not aware of any good serif font bundled with Android.
EDIT - for some of my sites I've set up the stylesheet so that iOS and Mac/Win get system fonts. Android and Desktop Linux get web fonts.
Is it me or did that medium article make a big stink about using system fonts, but it sits on a page that has a font specified as medium-content-sans-serif-font which isn't even a URL-ed font. It is base-64-ed into the css file so the font is not even cacheable across sites if other people bothered to use it.
The screen would dim more aggressively and location-aware apps would be less accurate. Many users would be annoyed by this, though they might not know it was a result of the battery-saver setting.
When you turn battery saver on transition animations disappear (making everything feel less reponsive). The phone stops polling for updates as frequently. The screen dims. It's a noticeably worse experience because it does a lot to save battery. When I have plenty of battery or know that I'll be charging my phone soon I would much rather have all of those nice things than not. It's a tradeoff because the circumstances dictate how important saving battery is.
Sometimes you want the richer resources though if you're on a better connection or the resources are cached rather than this being the first page load.
In my view we definitely need a "lazyload" attribute for script, link, and img elements.
My feeling on web fonts is that that they can sometimes look nice but aren't worth the page weight. My approach is to pick two fonts I expect MacOS and Windows to have, then fall back to generic. Other times, I'm more lazy and just use the generic.
Nice. I was only familiar with the original one; I wasn't aware that there were more. It appears to be the most recent one? I was hoping to find a comprehensive list of this kind of site somewhere but didn't. I did find these by following some breadcrumbs:
I don't think #3 is a particularly strong example, though. I don't think it looks bad - In fact I think it looks good; my personal site uses monospace fonts - but I think it adds too much to make its point effectively.
#4's criticism of #3 is spot on, and its mention of Let's Encrypt, gzip and caching make it my new favorite. Thanks!
I completely agree. I always choose two fonts that I am find with displaying which are available basically everywhere, then I add a default of san serif and I'm done with it. Yes some fonts do look better but after spending a better half of my career dealing with situations in which the latency for a computer and a server might be several seconds I've developed a bias against using web fonts.
But if you want to use them make them optional like this site explains :)
One problem with this approach is when you're relying on web fonts for Unicode character ranges which aren't universally supported by your visitors’ OS.
A compromise approach which can work nicely is declaring @font-face values using unicode-range to target specific language blocks and then having your font-family be something like 'sans-serif, noto-sans-whatever` so it'll default to a similar system font but load the webfont when the page actually has a character which isn't in the system font.
It'd be something else to manage updates for and the base OS support is pretty good on modern releases. These days, the gaps I see are for fairly obscure languages and since webfonts solve that problem and can do conditional downloads, I doubt it's worth the trouble.
Yes, web fonts often suck on slow connections. Meanwhile, on fast-ish connections, I find the FOUC effect to be greatly annoying. That 1-2 seconds of seeing Times and Helvetica and then seeing Freight Text Pro and Proxima Nova drives me bonkers. I think there must be some kind of happy medium between FOUC for faster connections and rage-inducing FOIC for slow connections. Unfortunately, most devs (and sadly I claim to be one) don't test their sites frequently on a range of connection speeds so it's common to have badly-tuned font dynamics on sites.
Bottom line: as someone who cares about design and visual experiences, I don't think the answer is just accept and live with FOUC everywhere. Browsers and dev tooling both need to improve in order to find that happy medium.
I think the Chrome behaviour (display invisible content for a while, then after a timeout render using fallback fonts) would be a happy compromise were the timeout not three whole seconds.
font-display: optional and font-display: fallback (as linked in the article) look like promising solutions to the problem (both recommend a FOIC aka 'block period' of 100ms), but it'd be even nicer to set the exact duration of the block and swap periods in CSS.
To be fair, 500k, at least compared to some webpages, is actually a fairly small size. This isn't really a case where a percent of the total is useful.
I've been slowly adding the contents of Google Fonts into my system fonts storage as I see them used on sites that I visit often. Things like Open Sans and Roboto for instance are quite common.
I think there would probably be a good case for an extension to automate that in some fashion for fonts with known open licenses (essentially anything from Google Fonts, for example) to go ahead and just install them into the system.
There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.
You might not care, but as an FYI that can be used to fingerprint your browser more accurately.
And if you are a developer, make sure you correctly test your site on machines that DO NOT have the fonts installed, as the browser won't even try to load them if it already has them, and you'll likely never find any bugs related to that until it's too late.
Those are fair points. Probably my ideal solution would involve an LRU cache (and not installing it on development machines and/or easy to spin up fresh VMs for load testing).
> There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Assuming they're using pure CSS for the font loading (which is standard for Google's CDN), yes, the browser will use a local copy in preference. (There's a way to disable that in CSS's font spec, although it's hard to think of a good use for that.)
Browsers try to load local fonts before remote fonts. At least anecdotally I've never seen a Google Font/Google CDN font bypass a local font, at least not with the default Google Fonts CSS code.
I'm pretty sure I've seen it at least 10 times now. I may have a problem.
That said, it helped me get through a (terrible) US Government class back in college. There's a surprising amount of useful information in that series.
There should be a 10x club (support group?). I think I've seen it about that many times, too. My favorite thing is how often Sorkin reuses the exact same lines throughout all of his works. I'm assuming this is 100% intentional, but haven't ruled out the possibility he was simply too high to remember what he wrote previously.
If there are any other West Wing fans here (and apparently there are!), you have to check out The West Wing Weekly podcast. It's hosted by two people, one of them Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on WW, and is basically them recapping each episode, as well as interviewing people from the show or somehow relevant to the episode (e.g. senators, etc).
Seriously, if you love the West Wing, I can't think of any way that you won't love this podcast.
For God's sake man, don't leave a huge, fast gif infinitely looping where I can see it while trying to read your blog post. Make it activate after I scroll down to a certain point, or on hover, or anything that doesn't make me feel like I'm trying to read through a strobe light.
Honestly, gifs in blog posts instantly add 50 years to my age.
Before you give me the No Fun Allowed badge, let me explain:
I'm probably reading your post because I'm searching for something, in a hurry (software: it breaks apart!). When I see a gif or beat-up meme in a software-related post, it does the opposite of lightening the mood.
Badly engineered, multi-purpose WordPress themes are my favorite on that matter. Not only they make you download the entire set of assets ( Think of ~2 icon fonts, half a megabyte stylesheets, megabytes of JS and on top of that 5$ DO box serving all the PHP `magic` ), but also include some entrance animations, which take additional time, before you focus on the content.
Actually this reminds me of the IoT DDoS attack. The low-tech users, making a blog by clicking around and installing 25$ theme are actually unaware that their website drains mobile-bandwidth.
So if you are developing one of these portfolio-with-landing-page-with-blog-section-woo-commerce-supported mega theme, please consider optimizing assets as your next priority.
Most of these are premade themes from themeforest or other similar marketplaces.
The devs have no incentive to optimize their themes as they are usually bought by non-tech people and they don't know how adding five different fonts in their website makes it really hard to load and render.
This is true, they don't understand how 5+ fonts make it hard to load and render. But they do care about bandied about stats like 83% of people will leave a site if it doesn't load in -0.3 milliseconds.
Are there actually font blockers like ad blockers? That would solve the problem pretty easily for everybody who's annoyed. Although they probably won't be available for mobile browsers, where it's the most painful.
In Firefox, >Options >Content >Fonts >Advanced Unchecking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..", blocks Webfonts and System fonts which configured User fonts have the necessary characters to render.
In about:config gfx.downloadable_fonts.enable > false ,will block all webfonts, but this breaks many sites like imgur & g̶i̶t̶h̶u̶b̶ which use webfonts to display navigation icons.
I hadn't noticed github switched, I thought svg might be a bit heavier but they say pageload time hasnt suffered and rendering 'jank' improved.
Github were using correct ranges for their octicons at least. iirc there is a common software named 'fontawesome' which has caused trouble by creating custom webfonts with incorrect character ranges.
Font Awesome [0] is more of a service than software. Yes, if a site is using icon fonts, more likely than not they're using Font Awesome's (telltale "fa-" names in the source). They're adding a "pro" level that offers SVG as an option.
I use NoScript for Firefox, which can block fonts for untrusted sites. There is also a setting, in the browser itself, to universally prevent sites from from using their own font specification, so your font choices are the only ones used everywhere. I used to use that, but some sites use icon fonts (e.g. Github), so I prefer being able to whitelist specific sites with NoScript. I also set a minimum font size to maintain comfortable reading across all sites.
Firefox on Android has a switch for this. Menu -> Settings -> Advanced -> Show web fonts. The mobile web is remarkably faster to load with it off, even on wifi.
I use this option. It's nice, but beware that your system fonts may not provide all of the unicode characters some pages expect, which can sometimes greatly hinder usability for sites that use such characters (and nothing else) in UI elements.
Ah, yep, my bad. I'm evaluating some other software called Fusion (completely non-related) and I guess it was just stuck in my brain.
Focus is awesome.
Interesting side-effect, it MAY be breaking Google AMP pages for me. I haven't really dug in to find out, but don't think a single AMP page has loaded for me on my phone.
Also, in preferences, you can uncheck the box that allows sites to choose fonts. After I saw your comment I fired up Chrome to check and was surprised that there seems to be no option for this.
Welcome them to the wonderful world of unicode! I flipped over all my icons to emoji, they're reasonably comprehensive, albeit less standardized (if you have really persnickity designers that might bother them).
Firefoxes 'user font' facility tries to accomodate them by fallback to Webfont if the glyphs are not included the user fonts unicode ranges. This works with sites that use icon or expansion unicode ranges to display icons, but some eg. imgur assign icons in the range for common characters, so they look dumb, but at least something gets displayed.
You can disable custom fonts in most browsers. I've had them disabled for years in firefox. My only complaint is that occasionally some sites use custom fonts as icons (why!?) for buttons. (microsoft in particular loves this)
Are web fonts smart enough to download only the symbols that you’re using? With Unicode growing all the time, and fonts supporting significant parts of that total set, it would be insane to have to download hundreds of thousands of symbols when you’re just trying to write a 3-word headline.
Another problem is aggressive filtering, oddly. I once visited China and found my entire web site wouldn’t load; it turned out to be triggered by a font from a Google domain. How silly for content to be thrown out because an optional style element is unavailable. I have since stripped out all my Google dependencies.
Nope, I don't think so. It would be hard to pull off as you might be using the font on an <input> and the user could type any character. Or you could be pulling text in through an XHR and won't know in advance what characters will be returned.
This has been tried and failed many times in the past with other things. The biggest problems are with what a "canonical" version actually is, and security.
Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues.
The big one for fonts is that you very rarely include a WHOLE font in your site, you generally include a subset of codes that you care about (if you are targeting english speaking users, no need to include russian characters...). But in addition to this, unless everyone everywhere agrees to load a specific version, file encoding, file format, compression format, compression settings, and more, the checksums will be so spread out as to be basically be useless. While it's less of an issue with fonts vs something like .js files, it can still be a problem.
And someone else already touched on the security issue, but to go into more detail. At the very least, caching ANYTHING cross-origin lets any page you load probe for things in your cache. To use a bit of an absurdist example, A government website could try to load fonts used on a popular "terrorist" website, and if it gets a cache hit, they can immediately be pretty sure you have been on the site recently. The size of most caches, and the propensity for people to clear their cache (or use private browsing) means that this only gets more and more accurate.
It's one of those things that sounds like a great idea on the surface, but in the end it would end up causing more issues than it solves. That being said, I believe there is a proposal somewhere for a standard along these lines, but I can't seem to find it any more.
Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues.
Oh? We have browsers eating a gigabyte of RAM now.
Not really. It all depends on how the cache is implemented. Maybe get an option for installing of a font or handle it like SSL and only install fonts from known, good actors which can be invalidated should one go bad.
Caching doesn't help that much if you're only sending the subset of the font that you're actually using for a given page. I'm not sure the same font gets loaded from different places all that often either.
If the recommended alternative is for everyone to use the handful of known system fonts, we very quickly arrive at everyone loading the same fonts anyway. Increasing that pool of options by having some additional choices in a cache would be nice -- especially for those of us on less popular OS's. And having to calculate a font subset per page and transmitting it along with the content doesn't sound like a winning tactic.
I find web fonts so annoying, along with images that don't load until you scroll to them. I usually read in Reader mode, and it takes the loaded page and re-renders it without web fonts in a normal style. But when the site doesn't load all the images, I end up missing half the article because I can't see what they're talking about. So annoying.
Why are GIFs in articles a thing? Can anyone focus on the words while they are looping in the corner of your eye? I always open the inspector and delete the elements, but it is annoying to do that every time.
I blame the browsers. There's no deep reason you have to introduce a piece of javascript to hide stuff from the browser so that it can load the page normally, and then add back the fonts. If browsers cared about making the web usable for everybody more than they cared about making web page look like slick native apps, they'd do it for you.
The way browser internals work is already designed for that. if the network is slow and you get only half the html, half the css, miss some images, or whatever, the browser will render as best as it can with what it got so far, and re-render when it gets the rest. The fact that it doesn't do that with fonts sucks.
In truth, if web design took seriously the constraint of bad network connections, the result would be much different to what we have today. This is but one example.
(And to be totally honest, if the author took that constraint seriously this page would be different as well.)
But in that world, things would be less pretty and less flashy, and that stuff means more to people than they would care to admit.
If there was a way to progressively enhance based on available resources (connection speed, usage metering, device performance, battery charge) we wouldn't have to compromise.
As it is, you either design something really bare for the worst connection (which works for some content, but not all, and keeps us from effectively using the power we have in our devices) and serve it for all devices/connections, or design something for a mid-tier device/connection, which amounts to a bad experience on weak devices/connections and an unimaginative experience on better devices.
I despise icon fonts with a raging passion. It feels like we're back in 8 bit time where we're using sprites for things that Man Wasn't Meant To Do with them.
Web fonts as real world fonts are kinda-sorta okay. Although it's yet another area where "All the world's a VAX" can proliferate, when designers think everyone's got the Windows font engine or their MacBook/iPhone's Hippidippi display.
All web developers should be forced to spend a full week using their site on each of LTE, 3g, and 2g. If your website takes more than 10 seconds to load on an ad-block free LTE device you're fired.
There is absolutely nothing forcing people to use the internet through their phones, so I see no reason to force developers to optimize for it.
Some people eat their food through a tube, but you wouldn't force every cook to prepare all of their food to be eaten through a straw. And there you at least have a moral argument.
I think the easiest solution would be just not to use web fonts at all. Do you need fancy fonts on a website with technical documentation? I think you don't but sadly PHP developers added a whole megabyte of fonts to PHP manual. As a result one has to wait until the fonts are loaded to see the text.
And web fonts are often poorly rendered on Windows.
I want an option in Chromium that would allow disabling web fonts by default and enabling them on a per-site basis (like it has an option for disabling JS). And what surprises me most is that mobile browsers (which are often used on slow and metered connections) do not have such options at all.
I remember old Opera browser that is now long gone had a lot of options to make user experience better on poor connections (and a builtin domain block list). Well, at those times internet users had higher average IQ and now typical Internet user would not even understand what is the meaning of "disable JS".
>I want an option in Chromium that would allow disabling web fonts by default and enabling them on a per-site basis.
It's not a native solution, but apparently the extension uBlock Origin has a setting to block web fonts (people have mentioned it in this thread).
I use uBlock Origin as my adblocker, and it is a much better experience in terms of performance and usability than AdBlock ever was - so I wouldn't be surprised if the font option was equally well implemented. On mobile currently, but will try it out when I get to my computer.
As for toggling, there is a nice simple button that enables/disables the adblocking on the active site. I'm hoping it affects the font setting too.
The difference between web fonts and HTML/CSS is that HTML loads progressively and markup doesn't weight more than all other resources. So I am ok with both plain text and HTML pages but not ok with fonts until browser vendors make a better implementation and make them optional.
I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.
'Progressive styling' is way more annoying (in my humble opinion) than waiting some time. Pages like the verge can take minutes anyway, when the wifi is not optimal. When you do things progressively, the page just keeps on changing, and the page can't really be used. So if you have a long page with text, and the user is somewhere halfway, the font loads and... BOOM! You are reading text that is located 8 paragraphs from where you were reading one instant ago.
This is far more annoying with images which dont specify their size, but I would still consider it bad practice to use an uncommon font for non-artistic pages.
The shifting page layout is a symptom of a broader problem, in that it's impossible to accurately predict or specify the rendered dimensions of text. Even measuring a container after the fact is unreliable because of the arbitrary amount of whitespace in different fonts. You'd have to generate a bitmap image and detect a bounding box around the pixels, which definitely won't help with loading times. This can't be done at development time because different browsers and system configurations all render the same fonts slightly differently. So, even sticking with system fonts to avoid this one symptom, we have this giant elephant in the room making it difficult to ensure anything but the most primitive layouts will be legible across devices.
Seems like it could at least be mitigated on the browser's side though: "This text was at the top of the viewport before the restyling, so let's scroll the document to the point where that text still appears at the top."
Yeah, so it clearly can't solve everything, hence "mitigate" instead of e.g. "completely solve". In any case, I'd argue that 90% of the time it's better than doing nothing at all.
Counting pixels is primitive; accepting text layout variance and making the web page look good with all variants and renderings of any reasonable font is less primitive.
Visually inspecting the output in a handful of environments and hoping it generalizes to all current and future environments, because there is no way to programmatically determine what the environment is actually doing with the content, is primitive. But it works well enough for blogs and shopping carts, so there must not be a problem.
Yes, but isn't it so that the system font is displayed in one step? I mean, if you just have HTML with images with their dimensions specified, I don't think the page will jump around.
Whatever you want to call it when text can barely be read, falls out of alignment, or disapears entirely because a font renders at a fraction or multiple of the size of the desired font, despite being the same "size" in "centimeters" or "pixels" or "ems", or when hair-thin text that looks great on an iRetina is rendered on low-density screens, etc.
>I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.
I suppose some people are happy with color: red, while others like a bit more variety and opt for color: #a82a33.
> I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.
Imagine you're a company whose business operates exclusively through your website. Imagine further that your company is the sort for whom design is critical because it drives your business. You are going to insist on making sure everything looks perfect in every scenario.
You can think of it as design control-freakery. Typography really matters to some people.
"The sort of company for whom design is critical" doesn't coincide at all with the sort of company for whose website a pixel-perfect layout makes sense.
Why would expert designers show off bad typography instead of good, and in the website rather than in products?
This "design control-freakery" proves that someone doesn't master simple and proven web technology. Why would you trust them with something technically complex like faithful color printing or something "artistic" like designing a logo?
I had a very strong impression that the quality of Web typography took a colossal nosedive when web fonts became a thing. My suspicion at the time was that this was largely a result of designers pushing pet fonts that looked fine on their Mac but like crap on other OSes (due to different rendering/hinting algos); can't prove that, though.
I did try disabling web fonts in Firefox, but then that semi-broke sites like GitHub who seemed to think that using them to display UI button images was a good idea. This is why we can't have nice things. And why designers are sometimes held in less esteem than they might like.
I had the exact same problem in China last month, only worse because I was also going through a crowded VPN. The only page I could reliably load before losing patience was Hacker News.
The best workaround I found was to load Opera Mini and crank up the compression proxy. It's annoying though, if Opera Mini can automatically compress the page's imaging and formatting, why can't the web server do the same?
We can nag designers/developers all day long about web fonts and whatnot, but at the end of the day, only an automated solution is going to actually get put into regular use.
it's easy enough to edit web fonts to include only necessary characters, but most EULAs won't allow for this. any font licensed under the SIL open font license is fine, though you may have to change the font's name if it has a reserved font name (check the license file). this makes a huge difference (fonts under 10k), but no one ever bothers to do it. not sure if inlining them as base64 in your CSS and serving with gzip would help much more.
a lot of the stuff that we do in font editors is going to start happening in-browser. variable fonts that use two masters (the thinnest and heaviest font weights) to interpolate all the other weights in-browser are an emerging standard that will get font sizes down[0]. you're essentially being sent two fonts over the wire that can generate quite a few more. font files are bloated in a number of ways. eventually we'll have a standard where diacritics like ¨´ etc can automatically be added to letters without the need for an entirely separate glyph. (å,a,á,ä, are currently separate, which is very expensive).
google, adobe, and other big players are hard at work on this stuff, and it won't be long. there are pain points now, for sure, but to me this isn't an argument in favor of system fonts. most of web design is typography design, and anyone who says otherwise probably hasn't been designing for the web very long.
Web page should just disable web fonts, if they are not loaded after 1 second and reenable them, when they are loaded. It's not hard to do and it's greatly improves usability. Actually it would be nice, if browsers would do it automatically, show system font, if web font is not cached and it's not going to be ready in the next few milliseconds. Anything better than white page.
Chrome does something like this already. I think it's something the browser should take care of, rather than having every site use some half-baked JS solution which ends up just adding to the bloat.
There are no more guarantees about which font is installed, although you will probably get a decent match if you use one of the old Microsoft core fonts (Verdana, Times New Roman, etc.). Just don't expect the exact font; often you will get a font that matches the metrics for the one you've chosen as a fall-back for those (once) popular fonts.
In any case, you can always safely specify one of these font groups: sans-serif, serif, monospace. These will give you the user's default font for that broad category of typefaces. No guarantees about which font you will get though.
If you do want to leverage installed fonts, you can craft a decent so-called font-stack that will cover a lot of fonts typically installed on various OSes. For instance, you might specify:
/* Just an example, these do not necessarily match. */
"DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Droid Sans", Verdana, sans-serif;
Again, no guarantees, that is why we have web-fonts.
Also, I am probably missing something, but don't you just get the fall-back font (e.g., whatever matches sans-serif) with a web-font as long as you specify one? Isn't that common CSS knowledge among developers?
As she's in Taiwan, she might have mentioned that webfonts, despite any pros and cons they have for western language sites, will never (never say "never"...) be useful for Chinese or Japanese sites. A bit off the topic of the article but maybe adds some perspective. Or not.
The gripes are valid and some of the links about fixing it are good content.
I'm starting to sound old, but "back in my day" people would use the 'media' parameter in link tags to load mobile-specific stylesheets. Has this practice died out? If so, why?
You can do it but designers want consistency on every device pixel perfect bla bla. All major OS providers should included in all the Google fonts by default and we can move on with our lives.
I wish that system fonts could be told the size of the characters of a web font upfront, before the web font was loaded. The system font's glyphs should smoothly fade/morph into the target webfont once it is loaded.
To solve the problem generally would be difficult or equivalent to the effort/data required to download the web font in the first place, but there may be a quick and dirty solution that covers 99% of text in the wild. The easiest case is monos paced fonts. Is there really an excuse why the system font can't be told via Css what spacing/height to use to match the target webfont?
To be more explicit, it is insane that we find it acceptable for text to reflow/ break over lines at different points once the web font is loaded. There is something that bugs me -- On the one hand we are being considerate and trying to make the reading experience pleasant. On the other hand we are being careless creators of jank. Maybe jank is something that primarily irritates nerds and I am overreacting.
I'm mystified by how many major sites have terrible usability issues on mobile devices that are used widely. (older iDevices cheap-mid level Android phones).
Are the proprietors of these sites, which live and die on their traffic, actually unaware of how bad the experience is?
Or are the proprietors oblivious because they always have the latest iPhone or Galaxy? Are the developers oblivious too, or are they keeping their bosses in the dark?
Or are the business requirements for the sight so absolutely needed, and it is simply hard to make it work?
My primary reason is that I don't view a page on the same display and machine as the author, so more often than not the presentation is sub-optimal or entirely unreadable locally. Custom fonts are similarly abused like low-contrast text (grey on white).
Also loading via JavaScript and changing the fonts of an already rendered page disrupts my reading. If you want remote fonts, load them from the beginning, or if this isn't possible, just don't, please.
Another justification for disabling remote fonts is that it's one security critical interpreter of complex data which, when disabled, doesn't adversely affect the presentation, whereas on most pages disabling images does and cannot reasonably be disabled. The latter justification may go away with Mozilla's Oxidation efforts with time, leaving just loading time and readability as arguments.
Problem is that lazy loading will introduce a flicker on fast connections or if the font is already in browser's cache since re-rendering of the page takes some amount of time (more content, slower it will be). And if you have multiple pages, this means this will affect even people on slow connections on every page except the first one. So it's not a win-win solution, one side will have more or less degraded experience.
I was roaming! T-mobile gives me free 2G when roaming, and I don't like temporary SIM cards because nobody knows how to call me if there's an emergency :(
I just gave up on web fonts and go with Georgia, Arial and a sensible set of fallbacks (although I try
Menlo instead of Courier first, because it's ugly in retina)
I got a message from my provider to say they are closing down their 2G network next year since hardly anyone uses it and they want to reuse the bandwidth for something else. Maybe this protocol will die out soon.
You do realize sometimes it's okay to have a page larger than, say, 50kb. Right? The gifs were a great way to show the exact issues she was discussing and they take up the bulk of that space. So why is that a bad thing in any way?
Yes web pages should, ideally, be small but that doesn't mean the media they show to the user has to be small as well.
The article's point is that all text not rendering cripples a page. Not seeing a specific image for a while, especially one that's relatively optional, is fine.
> 50KB isn't anywhere near 1.2MB. Did you mean 500KB?
It was a random number less than 1.2MB. So no I did not mean 500KB. In fact without media 50KB is a little site for a site IMO.
> The blog post specifically mentioned an experience on a 2g connection, and the bloat associated with webfonts.
Correct but media is always large. That's like YouTube having a blinking font issue so they fix it but people complain that the videos are still large.
>at its heart this is still the werkkzeug3/kkrieger engine, except with a new(*) lighting/material system.
And how many hours went into creating something like that? Do you think people would pay for the equivalent amount of hours for websites to be crafted like that?
Well webfonts, the thing she was complaining about, can often be far less than a MB, what with weights being a few hundred KB each. If I'm reading a long form article, I'd rather have them choose a nice, unique typeface for me to read (given the amount of copy on sites like Nautilus, nplusone, Intercept, Aeon, etc. which can amount to 90% of a page) and either lose the unnecessary javascript or slim down the media.
Oh gezz, even google.com weighs 976 kB. Coming in at 1.2 MB isn't bad at all. Strip the two GIFs out (which are good content and behind links now anyway) and you've got ~500 kB. Perfectly reasonable.
I wasn't trying to suggest all web pages should be svelte. I was suggesting that a page complaining about bloat should probably be optimized. Especially when we're talking about web fonts that are typically 50 to 150KB.
I'd also call out a blog post that, for example, called out jQuery as being unneeded bloat, if the blog post itself used jQuery. Assuming the blog was itself run/configured, etc, by the poster.
Also, the post isn't about bloat anyway; it's about FOIC vs FOUC and lazily loading fonts. Complaining that the page is "bloated" at 500kb (Edit: Fine, 1.2MB, whatever) is a shitty nitpick.
It's 500KB now. It was 1.2MB. Perhaps complaining about that is a nitpick. If so, is it more of a nitpick than "It’s also your responsibility to make your site load super fast, and if you don’t, it’s totes fair game for people (me) to whine about it on Twitter"?
Edit: The post itself has some pretty snarky language targeted at "flash" caused by waiting for a 50KB to 150KB download of a web font over a 2G connection. I think it's fair game to call out 600KB+ of animated GIFS that are heavier, and certainly "flash" more than just once in the blog post complaining about "flash" and download wait times. Call me nitpicky. The author of the post fixed these things sometime after it was posted here, so...hmm.
Google is long-time bloated. Consider [1] russian secondary (often primary) search engine, 36kb with query completion and login info, 660kb results page for "hacker news". Search engine as it should be.
This comment is misleading and seems mean spirited to me. On a fresh page load with cache disabled, I'm reading 165kb transferred. The GIFs are useful and lazily loaded in response to user interactions.
edit: read the child comments, I was not entirely correct.
To be fair, the vast majority of that bloat is due to ~~the picture of her face~~ hidden GIFs on the page. Some testing reveals that the page, minus ~~her~~ those pictures, is 159KB.
If you were anything like me on my first data plan (a whopping 25MB/month) images are usually the first thing to go.
So instead of fixing the real problem - which is obviously connectivity - we need to break the web and add another layer of Javascript complexity to something that works perfectly fine without.
It's 2016. 2G is 25 years old (started in 1991!). Stop being cheap. Stop working with 2G.
I think you're used to the developed world. Here in India, most of the places (except big cities) only get 2G. 3G towers are being laid and will probably be operational in 2-3 years.
Tl;dr: if you are travelling in a foreign country and you think about whatever fonts... girl, you are doing it totally wrong. Buy a city guide, printed on good old fashioned paper, even if it is so 1990, and get a fuck off-line! Or just talk to the natives! In person!
I think you are a bit off with your comment. Having a web connection makes traveling much nicer. The authors mistake was not pre purchasing a data sim with a fast connection. Amateur traveler complaining about nonsense
The next time I pick up a chick I chatted up on a trip and I can't find back to my b'n'b because we both are so wasted and I don't have internet connection to use google maps I hope you will be there. At first to be able to use your 4G phone and at second to prove you how wrong you are.
Did you read my comment? I do not want to be [paste an "indispensable" first world service] proof if I am in a foreign country because it kills the advanture and makes me thinking about fonts and cats.
Part of the issue is dealing with progressive enhancement as far as slow internet connections go. How do you solve that problem? There is no native browser API to my knowledge that does not depend on using JS which isn't ideal imo.
Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.
P.S Would also encourage those who have the choice to use system fonts (https://medium.design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f) instead of web fonts. Seems more in-line with the spirit of the web and these fonts are very well tested in general.