Is the 2000TB/day number reasonable, or just clickbait?<p>It's all based on coming up with two numbers that when multiplied say that this resource is downloaded 73 billion times a day. That's 20 times / day for every internet user (even those using it on a 2G connection once a year). Given a reasonable caching period of 1 month, that'd mean the average user visits 600 different sites a month. That seems like much more than one would expect.<p>Or to look at it another way, global IP traffic is apparently estimated at 72000 PB/month. That's 2400PB/day. This font alone would then be accounting for 0.3% of all internet traffic, or 1% of all non-video traffic. Again, that's a very high number.<p>But at least it doesn't appear to be a totally impossible number either, just an awfully implausible one.
This is a great article. Some of these are already on the agenda for FA5, but there's some new stuff there for us too. We'll dig in and it's a TODO on the FA5 roadmap now. :)<p>Another thing I'm super excited about is stray points in vectors. We found some new tools for Illustrator that make this a LOT easier and will have a very real impact on bandwidth as well.<p>Super fun.
There are some really valid points in here and I dislike the idea of using the whole font when only a few icons are required.<p>But, isn't subsetting going to result in users now caching your subset instead of a cached copy of everything? I would think that does more harm than everyone grabbing a fully cached copy once from a cdn.
If you're only using a small subset of FontAwesome (as I suspect many people do), I'd imagine at some point it'd make a lot of sense to use data-uri's to effectively embed them directly in an existing request, which would be faster than a CDN?<p>I saw a talk by someone from Smashing Magazine where they basically did this for a subset of their WebFonts (downloading the entire font asynchronously afterward), then they cached their WebFonts in LocalStorage, but it seems like it make even more sense for an icon font where you're using a very small subset.
Wouldn't the most obvious solution be to open-source FA fonts and include them in Linux, Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android? If they were installed on all systems then we wouldn't really have this issue at all. Given the ubiquity of some fonts this doesn't seem impossible.<p>Or and sorry to say cause I like FA, screw them and see if Apple/MS/Google can have an open standard icon font that doesn't suck.
I've been using <a href="https://icomoon.io/app/" rel="nofollow">https://icomoon.io/app/</a> for years now to pick only the fonts I like and it can also generate icon fonts from svg so that I can merge different icon sets and pick the only icons I will use in my projects.
That's a lot a bandwidth for a single thing. Makes me wonder, perhaps we should have a global repository of popular web libraries for browsers, all of them versioned, like happens on npm/bower. It's possible be backwards compatible with old browsers using a real and standardized URL. A single source of the truth. It's better than many CDNs providing the same thing over and over again... Being immutable packages browsers do not need check for updates (no more waste with 304 responses).
Unfortunately I think a lot of the points in this article are lost if you assume that the CDN's serving up the TTF for FontAwesome are using GZIP compression.
Stuff like this is like rearranging chairs on the titanic - 26 kilobytes is a drop in the bucket compared to the bloat created by all the other shit people slap on to their sites - ad scripts for example
One of the quoted sources is titled<p>>How Font Awesome 5 Became Kickstarter’s Most Funded Software Project<p>I checked their kickstarter, however.
>35,550 backers pledged $1,076,960 to help bring this project to life.<p>Pillars of Eternity, most assuredly software, was a kickstarter I backed. Their campaign page reads to this day:<p>>73,986 backers pledged $3,986,929 to help bring this project to life.<p>Why make up such a shitty lie? Does it matter if you have the longest John in the pub? Is this something USA specific down the American Dream/Meritocracy/Competitiveness axis? I find most European projects to be more modest about these things.<p>No hate please! None intended here. It just feels weird to me.
People seem to be plugging font generator websites, so here's what I use and highly recommend: <a href="http://fontastic.me/" rel="nofollow">http://fontastic.me/</a>
The fork commits only the modified font files, so as soon as the upstream project modifies the font files it will be out of date. Might it not be better to script the optimization passes?
You can also serve the font files with the `Cache-Control: immutable` HTTP response header so the client never needs to revalidate with the server (even when the user forces a page reload). Use versioned filenames for immutable resources if you need to change them later.<p><a href="http://bitsup.blogspot.de/2016/05/cache-control-immutable.html" rel="nofollow">http://bitsup.blogspot.de/2016/05/cache-control-immutable.ht...</a>
We are actually in the process of changing our Font Awesome font usage into svg versions of the font (via Icomoon's free converter tool) due to some of our customers blocking web fonts on IE11 via Windows Registry settings, claiming security issues...<p>But one nice side-effect of changing it to svg versions is that our clients are now loading icons on demand and only the ones being used in the app, as opposed to the whole web font.
Despite all the hand waiving about accuracy of the claims or the efficacy of CDN fronted caching, etc etc, it is good to see more initiatives around saving (especially mobile) bandwidth use. After moving from EE into full stack js I've been blown away as the duplication present
The FOSS web community should participate in a global feature freeze and stop creating new libraries and frameworks for a year or two to work on stuff like this instead. Just so much opportunity everywhere.