Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't understand the claims re: font loading.

> Vercel's impossibly fast CDN delivers new.css and the font Inter using xz/fonts, so there's virtually no bloat added to your pages.

It's 300kb of font downloads, hardly light. And the xz/fonts page says:

>Break your users from unethical tracking networks

I'm still making a request to a 3rd party CDN with an origin header that says what page I'm looking at, so I'm not sure what privacy I'm gaining here.




You can always set a referrer-policy HTTP header on the origin site to prevent the CDN from getting the path (or even the domain) of the web page. They’d still see user IP address but on its own that’s not very useful.


It's the `Origin` header that's the issue, not `Refer(r)er`.


Slightly off-topic but this made me wonder: is it possible to store the 1000 most used web fonts locally and tell your browser to use the local version instead of the Google version?


Decentraleyes[0] does this for JavaScript files. There was a request to add fonts[1], but it hasn't been implemented.

[0]: https://decentraleyes.org/ [1]: https://github.com/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/34


Cool, thanks! Definitely going to install that extension. It seems they moved to Gitlab, I subscribed to the new issue[0].

[0]: https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/-/issues/34


I guess the key word is “unethical”.


Hey, developer of both here. It's certainly not a light download, I understand. It's more of an effort to pull CDN requests to known unethical networks, namely Google Fonts, which are known to be used to track users between websites.

I'll be more clear about this in the future, thanks for your opinions!


Any source about the unethical bit? Their privacy section looks good

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...


I still don't see how switching from Google to a VC-backed CDN startup is better for ethical purposes.


It's better, but it's still not as good as just using the browser default font.


Or just serve them yourself.


They also have a lite version that uses system fonts, for whatever it is worth.


While I do like the style sheet that was created, the marketing spin on this page was off-putting to me as well.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: