[questiondev]

that is true but it increases the barrier to entry for those who use google fonts for system resource issues, a lot of people offload because they don’t have the space or money to self host everything

one could argue that it is less eco friendly as well given how much space is going to be used repeating the same file on a multitude of servers

[Youden]

A $5 VPS comes with several gigabytes of storage. A standard web font (e.g. Roboto) is ~1MB. Bandwidth is essentially free through CloudFlare. Who doesn't have the space or money to self-host their fonts?

[krehl]

This as well would "leak" the IP address to Cloudflare, wouldn't it?

[hammyhavoc]

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/trust-hub/gdpr/

[cuu508]

> A standard web font (e.g. Roboto) is ~1MB.

Currently on HN frontpage there is an article "How to avoid layout shifts caused by web fonts" [1]. It lists several techniques you can use to reduce font size. One of the examples shows how subsetting reduces Roboto Regular size to 11KB.

[1] https://simonhearne.com/2021/layout-shifts-webfonts/.

[redleader55]

You're probably liable to pay the plaintiff 100 EUR for leaking their IP address to CloudFlare, as well as paying 100 EUR for leaking it to Azure/AWS/etc. /partially sarcasm

[Ekaros]

I'm really starting to question why aren't we using fonts that are standard part of browsers? Just have a reasonable sub-set supported by everyone. This would be great climate action too as we would not be wasting energy to redownload them billions if not trillions of time.

[hammyhavoc]

Agreed. But why not update what ships with modern OS so that these fonts can be used system-wide? Open Sans, Noto Sans and Roboto for everybody.

[kalleboo]

Is it really better to tunnel your whole site through CloudFlare than embed a font from Google, from a privacy perspective?

[skyeto]

(in reply to krehl) And in that specific case you should probably have a DPA ready. Big issue with anything Google-related (and probably CloudFlare) is that they may transfer the data outside of the EU[0].

[0] https://noyb.eu/en/austrian-dsb-eu-us-data-transfers-google-...

[ratww]

The Roboto woff2 file is actually only 16kb for each variation, and that's the format most browsers will use in practice.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

I wonder if you can get penalized for sending users' IPs to CloudFlare..

[hammyhavoc]

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/trust-hub/gdpr/

[cuu508]

> one could argue that it is less eco friendly as well given how much space is going to be used repeating the same file on a multitude of server

Browsers don't share cache between sites: https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-ca...

[brtkdotse]

A Google font file is just a small file, smaller than most images. You can download it and place is along side your css files.

And seeing how most websites are 20 megs+, the eco argument seems forced.

[lkramer]

An interesting question. Someone should do a environment cost impact on self hosting fonts (and other resources) vs client having to make lot's of requests to various hosts for those resources.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

None of the standard browsers share third-party cache across different domains. Made it too easy to leak data.