Should we stop using the Google font service and host on our own?

Yes.<p>But not for just the reasons given in the link.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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?<p>TL&#x2F;DR : Host everything yourself

I&#x27;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.<p>Both threads have way too much &quot;you&#x27;re all horrible people because I dislike your change&quot; and not enough constructive conversation. I&#x27;m sure a broken layout resulting from an upstream font change would be pretty frustrating, but with all the name calling, it&#x27;s hard for me to take the author seriously.

Tldr: Google says it won&#x27;t support version pinning for fonts hosted on their CDN.<p>So, if you want to use a Google hosted font, you&#x27;re stuck with bleeding edge. If that doesn&#x27;t work for you, you have to find an alternative host.<p>Bleeding edge means things like fairly drastic weight changes.

The more the way things change ...<p>It&#x27;s not new knowledge that &quot;Cool URIs don&#x27;t change&quot; [0], and I sympathize with the desire to not get your rug pulled from under you like that, but the anger<p><pre><code> &gt; I can&#x27;t even breathe &gt; completely broke out design </code></pre> seems a bit over the top. If a change in font weight completely <i>breaks</i> a design, instead of just making it look odd or different, then I really don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s good design.<p>... the more they stay the same<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;Provider&#x2F;Style&#x2F;URI.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;Provider&#x2F;Style&#x2F;URI.html</a>

I understand that what Google did was shitty. But then again, the Google Fonts service, as far as I can tell, doesn&#x27;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.<p>I guess self-hosting is probably the best solution if you want to more &#x27;control&#x27; over what&#x27;s happening.

As a designer I must disagree with some of the arguments posted - the end user might not see a &quot;difference&quot;, but ultimately he will have another experience - he just doenst know how it was supposed to look.<p>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&#x27;s weights that drastically _is_ a major problem for designs using it.<p>That said, as a programmer I can&#x27;t disagree more with how the issue is raised and the tone towards the maintainers - and absolutely agree with them.<p>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.<p>Complaining to the author for changing his product is really far off when you&#x27;ve been using a free offer in the first place.

Or use normal fonts. I really don&#x27;t want to have to download your custom fonts.

Yes.<p>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.<p>When you include assets on your webpage from third parties you always have to expect that they change. Avoid it if you can.<p>For fonts this is mostly annoying as you can&#x27;t control your layout. For Javascript it&#x27;s outright dangerous: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.hboeck.de&#x2F;archives&#x2F;889-Abandoned-Domain-Takeover-as-a-Web-Security-Risk.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.hboeck.de&#x2F;archives&#x2F;889-Abandoned-Domain-Takeove...</a>

TL;DR: Designers making drama over a font weight change nobody but them will notice.<p>It&#x27;s an inconvenience for sure, but claims about &quot;drastic changes&quot; and &quot;websites looking completely different&quot; are essentially nit picking.<p>Also, if a slight change in font weight breaks your website, your design &#x2F; HTML &#x2F; CSS is wrong. The web is elastic.

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.

For me it&#x27;s a no brainier, and the answer is yes. Or better: use standard fonts in a creative way.

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

LOL: &quot;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.&quot;

So some webmasters are handing over even more visitor metadata to google&#x27;s surveillance leviathan just to shave 100k or so off their page load, and the takers of this &quot;deal&quot; are indignant that Google&#x27;s versioning isn&#x27;t robust enough?<p>Break out the tiny violins!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com&#x2F;</a><p>You&#x27;re welcome.<p>(Not my creation, but I&#x27;ve been using it for every website I have a say on.)

personally i block web fonts regardless, particularly on mobile.

It&#x27;s been a while since I really cared about this realm, but wasn&#x27;t the big deal with Google Fonts in the beginning that licensing was almost impossible to deal with as an individual or small company?

We need a smarter internet that caches content-addressed objects in a CDN dynamically (based on number of users, or age).<p>That would solve the whole font service problem.

What is the incentive to have Google host your fonts anyway? It&#x27;s something that you&#x27;d never want to change or update, and something that requires next to no maintenance.

Why would anyone ever think they should link to off-site resources?<p>My guess is their only real experience with the web is a few years in college.

How long before a Google employee snaps from the brazen entitlement of their non-paying users?<p>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.

The internet was supposed to be decentralized, no? Now everyone relies on a few big parties.<p>Luckily Google is too big to fail now so it&#x27;ll be rescued by taxpayers should the shit hit the fan.

&gt;We want everyone on the latest versions for caching reasons<p>From a privacy perspective, I&#x27;d love to know what the &quot;caching reasons&quot; are.<p>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&#x27;s best interest.<p>I don&#x27;t think saving money on bandwidth is Google&#x27;s primary concern at this point.