
Google Fonts Analytics - rememberlenny
https://fonts.google.com/analytics
======
raphlinus
I was part of the team that founded this, about 10 years ago if memory serves.
I'm still loosely involved, though no longer at Google. Inconsolata was one of
the 20 fonts for the original launch, and we're now in the process of
launching it as a variable font, with both width and weight axes. I'm also
getting funding from them for Rust-based font tools.

Feel free to AMA, though no guarantees I'll have good answers.

~~~
rememberlenny
I currently work on it as well, so happy to pitch in.

~~~
juandazapata
Does Google use this to fingerprint and track users across different websites?

~~~
open-source-ux
The Google Font FAQ includes the question: _What does using the Google Fonts
API mean for the privacy of my users?_

> "...your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any
> credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that
> are authenticated, such as Gmail."

>"Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access
to this data is kept secure."

[https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users)

~~~
McDyver
So a lot of fluff and no actual reply. Users can be tracked without cookies
being sent, while "access to the data is kept secure". Call me a cynic, but I
lost my trust in google a long time ago.

~~~
laughinghan
"Users can be tracked without cookies being sent"

How? Stylesheets can't use fingerprinting or Flash cookies or anything like
that, only scripts can.

~~~
nitrogen
Stylesheets can fingerprint with the help of a server to track what resources
get loaded or skipped, and a few clever media size queries etc.

------
perardi
In anticipation of "ugh, designers are ruining the web custom fonts", I'm glad
that variable fonts are starting to percolate out.

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-
ux...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-
ux/typography/variable-fonts)

Less overall file size, less HTTP requests. Combine that with preloading and
font-display, we're getting to the point where webfonts aren't a giant
bandwidth suck.

[https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/o...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-
content-efficiency/webfont-optimization)

(More room for ad tracking scripts instead!)

~~~
crazygringo
Oh wow, what's old is new again.

I remember when Adobe launched Multiple Master fonts [1] in 1992 (same
concept)... and then killed them in 1999 because not enough people were using
them.

I'll be fascinated to see if there's actually demand for it this time around.
I personally have had tons of times I've wanted a semibold where none existed,
or something halfway between regular and condensed.

But I'm not convinced they're going to save bandwidth for most sites. After
all, they incorporate two sets of font outlines along each dimension instead
of one, right? And you rarely see a webpage that uses _three_ variations of a
font along a _single_ dimension (e.g. sans-serif regular, semibold and bold).
A "third" font and beyond is more often a different style (italics) or
typeface (serif) entirely. So I don't see the savings in most cases...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts)

~~~
jcheng
As I understand it, Type 1 multiple master was simply superseded by OpenType
variable fonts back in the 90s, which is all that Google link is describing.
As a user it was a relief to have, afaict, all of the features of Type 1 with
all of the convenience of TrueType.

~~~
jcheng
Huh, I’m wrong. Apparently variable fonts were added to OpenType only
recently:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_fonts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_fonts)

(I think the features I was thinking of were ligatures and lowercase numbers)

------
jjeaff
Wow, if you used Google Cloud CDN to serve up that data, it would cost you
more than $1 Billion USD.

~~~
paxys
Got a source for that, or did you just make it up? Doing some very quick
estimation I can't see it being more than $40-60 million, and that is using
retail pricing.

~~~
kevindong
I'm getting ~$130 million with these assumptions:

* each font load is 170 KB (I downloaded Roboto and that's the file size of one weight)

* 36.3 trillion font loads (per the source)

* 36.3 trillion * 170 KB/font load = ~6171 PB [0]

Plug 6171 PB into the GCP calculator [0] with all egress via GCP Cloud CDN to
N. America and the bill comes out to just shy of $130 million.

OP is off by an order of magnitude by my napkin math, but it's closer than I
was expecting.

[0]:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB...](https://www.google.com/search?q=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB&oq=36.3+trillion+KB+*+170+in+PB)

[1]:
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c4...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=f75c7bdd-4c48-4179-9d63-5c67c6c63ed1)

~~~
paxys
I assumed 22 kb (compressed) font size. That's the average of the top 10 on
their list. (Roboto is 35kb uncompressed for me, not 170kb).

~~~
raphlinus
35kb sounds like the basic (mostly latin-1) subset. The size will vary a fair
amount depending on which subset is selected, etc. In any case, fonts will
almost always be served compressed, with WOFF2 being the vast majority of
requests.

------
sbr464
Get the raw JSON stats & font info with below links. Use httpie for
color/formatted results (replace curl with http):

    
    
      curl https://fonts.google.com/metadata/stats
      curl https://fonts.google.com/metadata/fonts

------
boarnoah
It looks like its lumping Android in with desktop linux. Since they are
differentiating platforms by the user agent that seems like an easy thing to
fix?

~~~
jsnell
The OS table has entry for X11 with maybe 2-3% shaer; I'd bet that's desktop
Linux.

~~~
Symbiote
That's an impressive figure. Macintosh (desktop Mac?) is slightly less than
double the X11 figure.

[https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-
market-share) has Linux usage at just under 1%.

~~~
londons_explore
Lots of "browse the web from this phone box" and "the departures board in the
train station that shows a webpage" will be Linux.

I bet many of them use Google Fonts, and with them auto-refreshing every 5
seconds all day long, they might get seriously overcounted.

~~~
jsnell
I doubt that the fonts get reloaded when the page is refreshed. According to
other posts in this thread, the cache TTL is 24 hours.

~~~
londons_explore
Most of these boards use kill -9 to restart the browser every half hour or so,
and likely nuke the cache each time.

------
tolmasky
The way google tracks fonts is so annoying. It took me furever to track down
this bug:
[https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345](https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/2345)

Basically, one out of a thousand requests delivers a broken font that breaks
document.fonts.load().

------
Animats
Why are people still bothering with Google fonts? They were useful when font
formats hadn't been standardized, and you needed WOFF, TTF, and SVG for some
Apple products. Now, WOFF works everywhere, and you can offer WOFF2, which is
compressed more. So why not just put the fonts on your own site and avoid a
side trip to Google?

~~~
onion2k
Google Fonts is free. Buying a licence to use a font on the web can be
expensive.

Also, Google Fonts does more than just delivering a font to the browser - the
text= and font subset features can reduce the download size a lot, which you
couldn't do if you were serving the Woff2 yourself on a dynamic site (eg you
didn't know what characters were needed before the page rendered on the server
or client).

Lastly,for common fonts like Roboto and Open Sans, there's a non-zero chance
it'll already be in the user's cache. That's a win.

------
aloer
The operating system stats are interesting.

Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac total requests.
The overall market share per wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors))
is something like 7% for Apple.

Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some way so I
wonder where that difference comes from

\- windows breaks faster and must be replaced more often, increasing the
number of sold windows systems per year

\- windows users use computers differently? Must be a pretty big thing to
cause such a difference

\- more windows systems not connected to the internet?

I kinda doubt that the typical enterprise windows setup with strict firewall
rules etc. will have a meaningful impact on web fonts and IE 6+ seems to
support google fonts
([https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_su...](https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_supported))

Any ideas?

~~~
politelemon
The stats are interesting but do not warrant such a
condescending/misrepresentative view; they could easily be twisted around, for
example, to say

\- Macos has broken browsers and doesn't cache, resulting in multiple font
downloads per website browsing session.

\- Macos use computers differently? Do they refresh the page multiple times
racking up a download count?

The first odd thing about the stats is Linux's share; with a 2% market share
it's racked up 10T downloads. A major part of that is Android based browsers,
but a decent part of that will be Linux desktop users, developers, automation
tests and so on. Overall we should expect users' browsing habits playing a
part; there may be a large shift towards mobile/tablet web consumption and
reduced desktop web consumption causing a stats skew.

~~~
lotyrin
Any time CI hits a site with these fonts integrated an ephemeral session (no
cache) probably has to download them.

------
leahcim
I'm surprised that Linux is the most popular client for this.

~~~
skosch
That's probably because Android isn't listed separately.

~~~
vincengomes
Interestingly iPhone and iPad are listed separately.

------
ckdarby
How to track everyone, everywhere.

~~~
basilgohar
Pretty much. Provide a basic service to the Internet and get the benefit of
sucking-in all that usage data. Here's to hoping we somehow figure out how to
use something in the future without handing over our data at the same time.
And don't tell me "we did this to ourselves because we didn't want to pay for
it with money, so we pay for it with privacy", you pay companies and they
still do this. It's just too tempting for companies to miss it. We need
regulatory protections for individuals' rights over corporations' rights and
it needs strength behind to be enforced.

Answers? Oh, I don't have them, I am just pointing out the problem.

~~~
m463
decentraleyes plugin, although I wish there was an easy way to add local
sources

------
spectramax
Can someone provide insight into _why_ Google is hosting fonts for free?

Anytime an advertisement company decides to do something for free, my cynicism
goes on high alert. I am genuinely curious though - what's the business model?
Are they collecting massive amounts of data while offering fonts?

~~~
3pt14159
The reason I self-host fonts (that I paid for) on my personal website is that
I don't want third party tracking via fonts on my website. It's all first
party and I want to keep it that way. So there is your answer: It's an easy
way to track websites via another vector other than Google Analytics, which
many people block or which is not installed everywhere.

------
smaili
Does anyone know whether this service generates any revenue for Google? I
can’t see selling fonts data as something desirable by 3rd party companies but
maybe that’s just me?

~~~
rememberlenny
It does not, and they don't sell the data or use it for any tracking.

~~~
skosch
Their FAQ says that they don't (currently) use cookies, but it also includes
the sentence "Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests,
and access to this data is kept secure", so they could still do some IP-based
analytics.

More importantly though, it gives Google accurate insight into web traffic
(many users block Google Analytics, but almost everyone loads web fonts), and
it allows them to crawl websites more easily – before web fonts, many websites
used pre-rendered PNGs to show web-unsafe fonts, which made crawling
impossible.

Google has poured a lot of money into this, the fonts are free and open
source, and the users aren't the product. Overall, I think it's a rare win-win
story in this age of dystopian adtech.

~~~
skrebbel
> Google has poured a lot of money into this

Why, though? Not charity, I'd assume. The only other answers I can come up
with are pretty damn nefarious.

~~~
raphlinus
I can speak to this a little, in terms of pitches we made to management to get
resources for our little project. None of this is authoritative.

1\. A _lot_ of text was rendered into PNGs, and that made the web less
searchable, as well as less accessible, slower to load, and less mobile-
friendly. All 4 of these factors do have economic impact at Google scale.

2\. Fonts were one of the few features that Flash had that HTML5 was lacking,
and we wanted to accelerate that transition. Again, mobile was one of the
major driving factors.

3\. For a while, we were organizationally funded under Google Docs. Again,
fonts were one of the major missing features compared with Microsoft Office,
so filling that gap was strategic. Here, our open source approach really paid
off, otherwise dealing with proprietary font licensing in the context of
documents that can be shared and copied would have been nightmarish.

4\. To the extent that you are able to make the case that fonts make ads
better (or advertisers happier), getting modest amounts of funding ceases to
be a problem. To be clear, when I was on the team this was more of a glimmer
of future abundant resources than day-to-day reality.

Lastly, while "charity" isn't exactly the right word, the motivations of the
people working on the team are/were basically that we love fonts and want to
make the Internet better. At Google scale, we were able to sell the project
using basically a combination of the above arguments.

Never once when I was on the team were we asked to implement any form of
individual user tracking, nor did I hear a suggestion of such a thing. All our
work on collecting analytics was to improve performance and quantify our
impact. I have no reason to believe things have changed on that front since I
was directly involved.

~~~
nl
Are you the Raph who built Advogato?

I loved that site.

~~~
raphlinus
Thanks! Yes, I've had quite a varied career so far :)

------
keriati1
How much data traffic could google save if it would just bundle all fonts with
chrome?

~~~
thrownaway954
how much space would packing all those fonts take up?

~~~
LukeBMM
With some extra metadata, about 428MB.

[https://github.com/google/fonts](https://github.com/google/fonts)

Since the browser hands font rendering off to the operating system, however,
the most pertinent browser-specific adjustment would be updating the
(configurable) defaults (Serif, Sans-serif, etc...) for each supported
platform - Georgia instead of Times for a default, for example.

~~~
moftz
You bundle the top 10 most popular fonts and save about half the traffic:
counter is ticking about 20M per minute or 201B per week, top 10 fonts were
used 136B times this week, Chrome is about 3/4 of users. Bundling would save
(136/201)*(3/4) = about 1/2\. However, Google would lose about half of their
tracking events so I'm sure they've already thought of this and figured the
data is worth more than the traffic expenses.

~~~
thrownaway954
that to me is the real reason behind this service. it might not make money,
but the statistics and insight they get are worth way more than money.

------
Bedon292
Might be a bit of a dumb question. But when I load google.com and look at the
requests. It has fonts.google.com says 200 and 'from memory cache' is that
actually sending a request in any way to Google? Or is that actually handled
locally? Most of the time I am getting this, so not seeming to make actual
requests to them the majority of the time. Is it actually hitting their
servers for these tracking stats, or is something like that not even making it
to these stats?

~~~
zelly
It depends on the cache control headers sent by the original asset. If you
want to make sure you don't hit the CDN, install the Decentraleyes browser
extension.

~~~
raphlinus
At the time I was there, we aggressively set the cache control headers to
minimize the number of requests. Among other things, the font binaries were
all versioned and served so each URL was immutable forever. (There's some
subtlety around this, it's a 2 stage process with CSS first then the font
binaries, and the CSS was generally served with 24 hour expiration).

One motivation was sharing the cache among all sites that linked the fonts,
which at the time I think was a big win, but as has been mentioned elsewhere,
this is going away.

------
mrspeaker
I'd like to view web pages as the authors intend them, but I also don't want
to send details logging to google on every page I visit.

Is there a way to somehow proxy a subset of popular fonts locally rather than
block the CDN entirely?

~~~
tim1994
I think this should be added to the Decentraleyes extension
([https://decentraleyes.org](https://decentraleyes.org)) which does this for
popular JS frameworks. There is already an issue for this:
[https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387](https://git.synz.io/Synzvato/decentraleyes/issues/387)

~~~
Lammy
I love Decentraleyes but how would they redistribute most web fonts without
running afoul of their licenses?

~~~
sstangl
Download batches on initial extension load, and periodically thereafter, and
cache them locally?

------
mot2ba
Cool. I'm curious about how they counted it. Do they have opted-out setting?

~~~
londons_explore
Number of hits on the web server.

------
humblebee
What is GSA? A little searching hasn't brought up anything I could see being a
browser.

The closest I could find was Google Search Appliance but I wouldn't think that
is applicable to these stats.

~~~
brandonhorst
Google Search App. The app called "Google" on Android and iOS.

------
dwg
Amazing! And a great link to add to the resume of those designers!

------
totaldude87
The top OS for the year is - Linux (15.3T) and i dont know how to interpret
this.. Is this due to the web server?

~~~
farmerbb
The vast majority of those clients are probably Android

------
pietrasagh
In my "humble" oppinion only three most significant (decimal) digts count if
you are looking at growth.

------
cronix
Yeah, 36 trillion requests slowing down the loading of websites. Way,
unnecessarily, overused.

~~~
paulmendoza
If google embedded the top fonts in the browser this wouldn’t be an issue. I
don’t understand why the font selection in browsers is so limited.

~~~
btown
Practically there's no difference between a browser that lazily downloads
builtin fonts, and a global URL for a font file across websites with an
extremely long TTL. And you don't want the browsers to be even more bloated
than they already are!

~~~
gioele
> font file across websites with an extremely long TTL.

Caches are no longer shared across domains because doing so leads to privacy
leaks: [https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-
away](https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-cache-is-going-away)

~~~
sp332
-

~~~
anamexis
The parent comment's point is that this cache is partitioned by frame origin
(which the link details).

------
Ericson2314
It's long past time for p2p networks to make this number meaningless /
unknowable!

------
rococode
Anyone know what's up with "Slabo 27px"? Looks like its recent usage is much
lower than other fonts with similar totals (it's at 800m views in the last 7
days while the fonts above and below it are all ~4b). Also the only font I
haven't heard of in the top 20, though maybe I just happened to miss it every
time.

------
earthboundkid
Lobster is the new Comic Sans.

------
1023bytes
So much wasted bandwidth

------
zzo38computer
Well, I have disabled web fonts on my computer when I initially configured it.

------
thrownaway954
it should link to the font so we can see them

~~~
thrownaway954
Granted my own wish :)

[https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity](https://fonts.google.com/?sort=popularity)

------
daveslash
[ctrl]+[home] keyboard shortcut doesn't work on this page in FireFox. I had
some trouble with [ctrl]+[end]. It's quite disappointing to see basic
webpage/document functionality broken on a site claiming to improve the web
experience. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned web user.

~~~
londons_explore
Highlighting text and scrolling is broken too.

