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by ClumsyPilot 2026 days ago
> "Do you really want a browser to be gigabytes large? Especially on mobile it's not viable"

Absolutely, i would rather give the browser 50 GB even on my phone over paying my mobile operator for downloading the same data over and over again.

And it wouldn't take anywhere near that much, I am sure 80% of most used fonts are only a couple dozen, that wouldn't tale gigabytes

2 comments

It also doesn't have to be a binary proposition.

For example, Google Maps by default doesn't load maps of the entire world when you install it. However, it does let you opt-in to pre-downloading specific areas that you frequently travel.

Browsers could do the same by simply adding an opt-in to download / cache common assets like fonts, jquery, etc.

From a privacy point of view,

Not embedding all of them would allow tracking. Caching all web fonts would allow tracking.

The solution is embedding all the popular ones so everyone has them and it can't be used as a signal.

It would be interesting to gather a list. uBlock Origin can disable Web Fonts

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

so it should be possible to log. And given a list it is not hard to download.