
Should we stop using the Google font service and host on our own? - esistgut
https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1307
======
AndrewStephens
Yes.

But not for just the reasons given in the link.

When your page uses resources hosted outside your control, you are effectively
giving a third-party access to your users. This applies equally to fonts,
images from image hosting services, videos from youtube, etc, and especially
to Javascript code (including analytics).

At best, you are trading some bandwidth savings for allowing a third-party to
analyze your traffic patterns and users in return - maybe that sounds like a
good trade to you.

But at worst, your are allowing a third-party (or the people that buy that
third-party years from now) to break your site (removing images, etc) at any
time, completely outside your control. That is not even considering malicious
intent. Google is probably OK right now, but who knows?

TL/DR : Host everything yourself

~~~
jpdb
Do you have any suggestions for self-hosted analytics?

~~~
wongarsu
Piwik[1] is pretty good. For self-hosting, basic features are free and open
source, some of the more advanced features are sold as plugins[2].

There's also OWA[3] if that's more to your taste

1 [https://piwik.org/](https://piwik.org/) 2
[https://plugins.piwik.org/premium](https://plugins.piwik.org/premium) 3
[http://www.openwebanalytics.com/](http://www.openwebanalytics.com/)

------
bsimpson
I'm really disappointed in the tone of those threads. Attacking a maintainer
because you disagree with his decision is never OK. Attacking someone who
designed and released a font for free because you dislike his redesign reeks
of entitlement.

Both threads have way too much "you're all horrible people because I dislike
your change" and not enough constructive conversation. I'm sure a broken
layout resulting from an upstream font change would be pretty frustrating, but
with all the name calling, it's hard for me to take the author seriously.

~~~
beejiu
I particularly liked this comment: "This is not practical for agencies. The
sites have shipped, there's no budget for us"

I am sure whatever it costs to go back and fix those sites, it is far less
than what it would cost to license a commercial font.

~~~
etatoby
Lol that comment. What an entitled douche!

If I were a popular font designer, I would change my metrics every once in a
while on purpose, just to spite those people.

------
tyingq
Tldr: Google says it won't support version pinning for fonts hosted on their
CDN.

So, if you want to use a Google hosted font, you're stuck with bleeding edge.
If that doesn't work for you, you have to find an alternative host.

Bleeding edge means things like fairly drastic weight changes.

~~~
retSava
> find an alternative host

you can download and host it yourself

~~~
sp332
That depends on the font's license.

~~~
kps
All fonts in the Google Fonts directory are open source.

------
yosamino
The more the way things change ...

It's not new knowledge that "Cool URIs don't change" [0], and I sympathize
with the desire to not get your rug pulled from under you like that, but the
anger

    
    
      > I can't even breathe
    
      > completely broke out design
    

seems a bit over the top. If a change in font weight completely _breaks_ a
design, instead of just making it look odd or different, then I really don't
think that's good design.

... the more they stay the same

[0]
[https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html)

------
nishs
I understand that what Google did was shitty. But then again, the Google Fonts
service, as far as I can tell, doesn't have an SLA. At this point, complaining
that they switched font weights without notice is equivalent to complaining
that fonts.google.com servers went down on a critical Black Friday night for
your e-commerce site.

I guess self-hosting is probably the best solution if you want to more
'control' over what's happening.

------
krsdcbl
As a designer I must disagree with some of the arguments posted - the end user
might not see a "difference", but ultimately he will have another experience -
he just doenst know how it was supposed to look.

Typography is crucial to the appearance of a brand and to the voice of their
communication, so having a font in a cdn change all it's weights that
drastically _is_ a major problem for designs using it.

That said, as a programmer I can't disagree more with how the issue is raised
and the tone towards the maintainers - and absolutely agree with them.

If you want to be sure that your assets will stay the same, point to a
definite version of it that you have control of! If you do work for a client
and CI compliance is important, license (!) and host those fonts.

Complaining to the author for changing his product is really far off when
you've been using a free offer in the first place.

------
megaman22
Or use normal fonts. I really don't want to have to download your custom
fonts.

~~~
fredley
Then configure your browser not to download them.

~~~
gcb0
expect this to be disabled in chrome if enough people do this. just like they
disabled every single option to omit referer headers.

though referer header is directly tied to their monetization. the font thing
is just a good to have to collect some data.

~~~
opmac
so don't use chrome.

------
hannob
Yes.

I recently had to help a person with a broken wordpress theme. The reason: The
theme used a font from a thirdparty host and that host was gone. The fix:
Simple, get the font from the Internet Archive and host a copy locally.

When you include assets on your webpage from third parties you always have to
expect that they change. Avoid it if you can.

For fonts this is mostly annoying as you can't control your layout. For
Javascript it's outright dangerous:
[https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/889-Abandoned-Domain-
Takeove...](https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/889-Abandoned-Domain-Takeover-as-
a-Web-Security-Risk.html)

------
pier25
TL;DR: Designers making drama over a font weight change nobody but them will
notice.

It's an inconvenience for sure, but claims about "drastic changes" and
"websites looking completely different" are essentially nit picking.

Also, if a slight change in font weight breaks your website, your design /
HTML / CSS is wrong. The web is elastic.

------
3131s
My approach is to not depend on 3rd party services at all, because I want to
be relatively well-assured that whatever I create will still work 10 years
later or more without any modifications beyond security updates.

~~~
rootlocus
How about browser updates? I'm not sure it's feasible to expect any webpage to
look identical 10 years from now without any kind of maintenance.

~~~
jameskegel
Have you visited the website for Berkshire Hathaway?

------
kome
For me it's a no brainier, and the answer is yes. Or better: use standard
fonts in a creative way.

------
jhanschoo
For some perspective, note that many professional designers subscribe to a
paid subscription model CDN like Adobe TypeKit.

------
Froyoh
LOL: "please understand , the left project is for sneakers shop , intended to
be bold and stick out , now it looks like it was designed for lingerie shop ,
sexy and thin."

------
jstewartmobile
So some webmasters are handing over even more visitor metadata to google's
surveillance leviathan just to shave 100k or so off their page load, and the
takers of this "deal" are indignant that Google's versioning isn't robust
enough?

Break out the tiny violins!

~~~
etatoby
Not some, but _all_ webmasters, if you exclude a small minority of us who
understand the deal in the first place and don't like it.

------
etatoby
[https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/](https://google-webfonts-
helper.herokuapp.com/)

You're welcome.

(Not my creation, but I've been using it for every website I have a say on.)

------
hprotagonist
personally i block web fonts regardless, particularly on mobile.

~~~
msl09
I've seen people arguing in favor of this but what's the reason?

~~~
ordu
I would rather reframe this question: what is the reason to download fonts?
Downloading leads to page rendering lags and to reporting my browsing
behaviour to google, while I see no positive effects from those fonts at all.
So why I should be interested in downloading them?

~~~
matt4077
Fonts are one of the dimensions of design. If you've ever enjoyed, for
example, one of Edward Tufte's books on visualisation ("The quantitative
display of data" etc), part of their appeal as excellently crafted books stems
from the choice of fonts. The same happens on the web. See, for example The
New Yorker: [https://www.newyorker.com](https://www.newyorker.com).

Obviously everyone is free to block fonts, just like you can block all images
or use a text-only browser etc. But to categorically deny even the possibility
that well-chosen fonts can enhance the experience for some people seems
disingenuous.

~~~
mrob
The most legible font is the font you're most used to. If I let designers
chose fonts for me then I'll have to read lots of different fonts, instead of
just my own favorite. It can only harm my enjoyment of the web.

~~~
omg_ketchup
But blocking icon fonts makes the web less usable for you.

~~~
ordu
As NoScript does. Or Ghostery. It is problems of web, not mine. I could find
another site, if some one does not work properly.

------
LyndsySimon
It's been a while since I really cared about this realm, but wasn't the big
deal with Google Fonts in the beginning that licensing was almost impossible
to deal with as an individual or small company?

~~~
wongarsu
Buying fonts is somewhat expensive for individuals, and google fonts certainly
helped the free font ecosystem as a great aggregator.

But serving the fonts directly from google fonts instead of downloading the
fonts and serving them yourself has in my opinion always been a bad idea. In
any case it's not a licencing problem anymore, fonts published on google fonts
have clearly displayed licenses that usually allow a broad range of uses.

------
amelius
We need a smarter internet that caches content-addressed objects in a CDN
dynamically (based on number of users, or age).

That would solve the whole font service problem.

~~~
orliesaurus
Came in to support this sentiment

------
MiddleEndian
What is the incentive to have Google host your fonts anyway? It's something
that you'd never want to change or update, and something that requires next to
no maintenance.

~~~
matt4077
The chances of the font already being cached by a first-time visitor is
actually quite high for Google Fonts since their use is widespread and they
are not versioned.

~~~
MiddleEndian
Interesting. I wouldn't think ttf files were big enough for that to be an
issue.

------
featherverse
Why would anyone ever think they should link to off-site resources?

My guess is their only real experience with the web is a few years in college.

------
jstewartmobile
How long before a Google employee snaps from the brazen entitlement of their
non-paying users?

Aside from that, hell yeah! CDN is penny-wise and pound-foolish for so many
reasons. That, and if people had to go back to using their own bandwidth,
perhaps websites would go back to being slightly less bloated.

~~~
mynameisvlad
I didn't know it was entitled to want your font to keep looking similar to
when you first used it.

That's a pretty basic design ask.

~~~
jstewartmobile
Are you paying them?

~~~
mynameisvlad
Does it somehow matter? They might not be contractually obligated, but that
doesn't mean they should be bad actors about it.

People just want best practices to be used, nothing more. Versioning is one of
those. They released what amounts to a whole new font in the namespace of an
existing font; they even called it a "major" update and a "complete redesign".
On one of their most used fonts.

All people are asking for is that the Montserrat font be reverted back and the
new one released as Montserrat v2. They've done it before with major changes
to a font, it's not a hard thing to do and there's clearly already policy in
place.

------
Feniks
The internet was supposed to be decentralized, no? Now everyone relies on a
few big parties.

Luckily Google is too big to fail now so it'll be rescued by taxpayers should
the shit hit the fan.

------
snowpanda
>We want everyone on the latest versions for caching reasons

From a privacy perspective, I'd love to know what the "caching reasons" are.

Purely speaking in terms of big data, I think being able to track users across
domains by font requests, even those with ad-blockers, would be in Google's
best interest.

I don't think saving money on bandwidth is Google's primary concern at this
point.

~~~
matt4077
You're going out of your way to paint Google's arguments in the worst,
malicious light.

Their interest in caching is not to save their own bandwidth costs, but to
lower costs and load times for users. Google's efforts in the web performance
space are well documented (see lighthouse as one example).

The reasoning for "only the latest version" also happens to be the only one
that makes sense: having multiple versions of each font drastically reduces
the ability of browsers and CDNs to cache, quite obviously.

The motive you ascribe to google, namely user tracking, has absolutely no
logical connection to the "latest version only" practice: Google's ability to
track users would actually be enhanced by versioning, because their servers
are only ever contacted for uncached resources.

