By default, unless you NEED web fonts, why not just be respectful and use system fonts. Using web fonts us unnecessary for the bulk of websites. Every system has a helvetica/arial and georgia/baskerville family. Build a strong font family, and use webfonts sparingly when spacing and consistency are actually important. Why bloat bandwidth and page speeds for little gain.
As an aside, I spent a good 4 hours of my life the other week learning how to use FontForge to strip out all the extraneous glyphs from an Open Version of Garamond and saving into a WOFF format file for a website, resulting in a 64Kb file.
This because a) I'm not happy with Google tracking my users and b) I've been professionally making websites since the mid to late 90s and so started off in a world where an entire site came in at under <100kb, images included.
I'm not one to needlessly and unthinkingly throw up excess pageweight
Evidently you have your own thoughts on this, so it's pointless me bantering away - but why can't and why shouldn't I make my choice my default?
If I set up the stylesheet to have an order of preference, with a fallback to default system fonts that mangle my considered layout, then you're perfectly free to do what you will - but again (and we're going around in circles here) - it's my content, I'd rather like to display it as I wish.
Look, I'll be honest - there are times and situations where I wish there were still properly text based browsers that could read web content (assuming it's been marked up well enough in the first place) and display it in green-glowing monospaced terminal text - but there aren't. The world's moved on - I'm sorry you don't like it.
