Web Fonts Collateral Damage of Ad Blockers

While we&#x27;re discussing problems with web fonts, let&#x27;s not forget the other common ailment: setting body text in a 300-weight font. Plenty of people don&#x27;t seem to think to test web fonts on other OSes, as if font rendering were consistent. But what looks good on a retina Macbook Pro is completely unreadable on Linux or Windows. That light grey that produces a pleasing level contrast on a high-end IPS is nearly invisible on a three-year-old corporate-issue HP laptop.<p>Really, it&#x27;s just the usual cycle of exuberance, overuse, and understanding that all web platform features seem to go through, but I for one am overjoyed to be able to fix a page&#x27;s text via font blocking. For the light grey stuff there&#x27;s always reader mode.

I hope this entices developers to reconsider the use of private use area (PUA) [0] based icon fonts for key navigational elements. I see them used time and again, and a slow connection or spotty CDN can render these sites unusable. [1]<p>If you absolutely have to use icon fonts, at least use ligatures instead of a PUA. That lets you fallback to a whole word if the specific font isn&#x27;t present, or if the user relies on assistive technology like a screen reader.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Private_Use_Areas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Private_Use_Areas</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;GR9Jk2b.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;GR9Jk2b.png</a>

As a NoScript user, I rarely see web fonts and I prefer it this way. The text shows up instantaneously and the font will look great and be perfectly readable.<p>Most web fonts don&#x27;t look that nice on Windows. Windows heavily relies on hinting and doing this properly is a lot of hard mind-numbing work.<p>Most web fonts also aren&#x27;t that readable. Sure, your wide&#x2F;thin&#x2F;square font looks very modern and stuff, but it&#x27;s not as readable as a Verdana or Arial. When I visit your site, I&#x27;m there for the text, not the font.

I love typography and have no issues with the fonts themselves; font servers are the problem here, making several requests to download not only fonts but also js scripts. We could easily see Google Fonts as Google Analytics in desguise, same for Adobe. Encoding fonts directly into stylesheets works pretty well.

Fuck your web fonts. Seriously, just fuck them to hell.<p>I&#x27;ve been online since long before the World Wide Web was a thing, and I&#x27;ve watched the evolution of Web design from TBL&#x27;s first proposals, through background wallpapers, animated flames, multicoloured layouts, spacing pixels and table-based layouts through to the saviours that were supposed to be CSS and AJAX.<p>It&#x27;s all been a terrible mistake.<p>I&#x27;m leaning to a model in which a standard set of templates exist: article page, index, gallary, catalog, search -- and the client has a set of standard (or custom) templates to view them with. Client overrides server and author.<p>Yes, this means putting all but three Web designers in the world out of work. Couldn&#x27;t happen soon enough.<p>A recent discovery of mine was that the combination of uMatrix and Stylish is fantastic. As the first blocks by default <i>all</i> CSS, fonts, and JS, I&#x27;m given a blank canvas from which I can apply my own preferred stylings (look up Edward Morbius&#x27;s motherfucking Web page for a general taste). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;post&#x2F;GwGDOuSqWn91CRkQBUQeYQ</a><p>Before this it was a stable of over 1800 local stylesheets, most quite brief and&#x2F;or standard, to fix common gripes.<p>And it&#x27;s not just me. A visually disabled friend, totally blind in one eye, 20&#x2F;60 vision at best <i>with</i> correction in the other, and generally not particularly computer literate, has endless frustrations with gimmicky websites with all the usual crap: low contrast, tiny font sizes, hard-to-read fonts, poor colour choices, content which re-renders multiple times,etc.<p>I just spent an hour at the local Apple store exploring various accessibility options. While there are some for Mac and iOS products, they&#x27;re terribly insufficient. No way to globally set user font sizes. No way to make &quot;reader mode&quot; the <i>default</i> for either Safari or Firefox. No alternative to mouse and icon interactions in far too many cases.<p>And that&#x27;s just the OS. The Web as a whole is many times worse.<p>Readability Mode for the entire Web, with a small header space for branding, would be a huge improvement over the status quo.

In my view, fonts are just another case of potential conflicting interests between content creators and content consumers. I can easily imagine wanting to override the fonts chosen by content creators, for instance if a vision impaired person wants to substitute a more readable font (or even let a text-to-speech program take over).<p>Content blocking has been around forever. I remember when I got my first real Internet connection, and the first thing I did was to disable the automatic downloading of all images. It greatly improved my browsing experience on my 9600 baud dial-up connection.

Fonts are relatively small compared to media. Full screen top page images are only viewed once and mostly show nearly immediately on any decent connection, and are already several times larger than a web font or two used to style entire web sites. Full screen video is far worse in terms of bandwidth without user consent. And if you&#x27;re on a shopping site or any site with photos, a web font is practically one photo. It is not that expensive at all.<p>We must not also forget that web fonts have replaced text graphics. They can be small, but when used on every header or with multiple states in interfaces, they added up quickly. Not only are web fonts lighter, they are real text. We don&#x27;t want to revert to text graphics.<p>What we have is the designer on one end, and the user on the other. The designer wants to decide how the page is served. The user wants to choose how they consume the page. Some users may add salt and pepper, or remove all the tomatoes. Giving users power cannot be a bad thing. But do we want features that automatically change our food no matter where we go? And there may be some allergic to everything. Maybe they&#x27;ll turn off JS and not load any images, and be okay with half the sites being broken. But they will always be a minority that other&#x27;s shouldn&#x27;t be too concerned about. And they will always do whatever they want.<p>To know if a web font is ugly requires tasting it first, so at that point, you&#x27;ve already paid for what you may have tried to save. But considering how little weight web fonts are and how important they can be as part of what is being expressed by the composer of a page, ignoring it would be like randomly removing an ingredient deemed important by the chef.<p>Why risk those great sites for the one&#x27;s that suck? Why would we allow the worst food to dictate all of our meals? Shouldn&#x27;t we just call out bad web sites for what they are, instead of crippling our hard earned technology?<p>Imagine iOS 9 with Arial. Fonts are important.

This title doesn&#x27;t accurately describe the content of the article. The author&#x27;s argument is that web designers should be allowing default fonts while including @font-face fonts, and that Web Fonts had it coming. It also states that ad blockers are just an implementation of the idea of disabling crappy&#x2F;slow web fonts.<p>And my opinion: Please make your website legible. Serif fonts, or sans-serif fonts with high weights and large sizes and appropriate widths. Black rather than light gray. It would be really nice if I didn&#x27;t have to cURL your website or hack up its CSS in the Inspector to actually read it. The new design trends are cute, but there&#x27;s nothing like actually being able to read a page.<p>(and if you&#x27;re using Canvas or something, I&#x27;ve already closed the tab.)

You probably shouldn&#x27;t be setting your body copy in a downloaded font. That feature is more suitable for display and heading fonts, which are usually much larger than fonts used for body copy. People used to put headings in as images, which is a pain for search engines, screen readers, and everything else that understands HTML.

I don&#x27;t block fonts to make my web experience faster, I block them to reduce my browser&#x27;s attack surface on untrusted sites. Generally speaking, font-handling code is not exactly notorious for being well-hardened against attacker-controlled data.

I agree with the author on his main point, but his statement, &quot;[w]ebsites should not come with minimum software requirements,&quot; only works in a perfect world. Unless it can be shown in ROI, there is no reason to develop for anything but a modern browser (I&#x27;m looking at you old versions of IE).

&gt; &quot;...if you’re a user, chances are, you’re quite relieved (or even ecstatic) at the ability to block web fonts and experience a faster web.&quot;<p>These days, with increased processing power and standards adoption generally available, we really have been able to push the weight of websites.<p>Conversely, battery powered devices and sketchy wideband internet access are growing rapidly.<p>Sure, we have the power, but it&#x27;s becoming apparent that at this scale effeciency is very important. More users than ever want more content faster than ever.<p>Globalized (literally) asset sharing, with technologies like digest references in script and link tags could make a big difference. Why not even pre-package really popular stuff (jQuery, Helvetica, etc) with the browser or OS?

As someone fascinated with web design, typography, UI and the like, it may be worthwhile to point out that design can markedly enhance the rate at which salient information is digested, the real bitrate, if you like.<p>The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps not entirely scientific, but things like &#x27;aura&#x27;, &#x27;emotion&#x27;, &#x27;atmosphere&#x27; and &#x27;feel&#x27; can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing us to emote with others.<p>Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here) than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is going on.<p>Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset.<p>That&#x27;s because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the internet and remove all &#x27;colour&#x27; would take away the beauty and the poetry of what the internet allows us to do.

As a user, I hope this pushes designers to consider the aesthetics of a page rendered in a font supported by the browser. Unlike JavaScript, a web page rarely <i>needs</i> a custom font to function, so designers must assume users would block custom fonts if preferable.

Seems like use of fonts isn&#x27;t the issue, it&#x27;s the fact they have to be served. Why can&#x27;t browsers embed more fonts?

As old as the web can feel at time, we are so blessed to have Georgia as one of the standard fonts. It is such a good serif font, which is also why I think a lot of the typography out there is more ornamental than necessary.

I have blacklisted google webfonts with hosts-file entry as many websites use fonts from there that are terrible.<p>For instance open sans seems to be used more and more. Here&#x27;s what it&#x27;s like without antialiasing (top), vs Arial (bottom) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;b&#x2F;fonts.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.benjiweber.co.uk&#x2F;b&#x2F;fonts.png</a><p>Antialiasing hides some of the terribleness but it is still much harder to read than alternatives.

There are some interesting issues at play here. There is obviously some desire to have levels of standardized-form content that can be consumed in the way that the user desires.<p>However, I disagree with a closed internet. Websites, like brick and mortar businesses, should be able to do what they want. They are responsible for the user&#x27;s experience and should be able to craft it as they see fit. A browser (or extensions) should not be forcing an agenda for how consumers may or may not want to experience the internet. (Ads in partciular, are a unique part of the discussion).<p>I appreciate websites like medium, reddit, facebook, pinterest, and others that standardized content formats for users to experience in a consitent way.<p>The &quot;death of RSS&quot; is related here too. It&#x27;s a complex issue. With RSS the user has significantly more control, but the problem is that you lose context and it can often become hard to browse large amounts of content.

Site was down when I tried to load it today. Here&#x27;s a mirror via Google cache: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:miranj.in%2Fblog%2F2015%2Fcollateral-damage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:miranj...</a>

What blockers&#x2F;browsers should do is just <i>tell</i> scripts that they finished loading. Then sites would continue to work just fine. This kind of technique is gonna be needed to continue ad blocking once a lot of pages start trying to detect blockers and not display content.

and this blog entry is a prime example, choosing a font that was small and faint against a bright background, making me click on my DFT firefox extension to override it.<p>Worse is that there was absolutely no requirement for them to choose a small serif font for any particular web design reason.

this is one part of why i love my rss reader.