Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers(blog.cloudflare.com) |
Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers(blog.cloudflare.com) |
And the css is going to be gzip'd anyway.. so we're talking a few extra bytes. Nothing that would make any difference in page load time.
There's no need for all of that extra work you listed. But I get why you want it to sound complicated, so people will use your work instead. Shouldn't you put a "I work at cloudflare" in there somewhere?
I will say that this is probably overly complex and it would be easier to just download and serve the font files from your own domain instead. The CSS optimization isn't that necessary and is pretty much the same for all modern browsers.
For privacy,loading third party fonts like google fonts on your site allows the 3rd party(google) to track users. To avoid that,I try to load google fonts from my domain(and for performance when google is slow or unreachable). Arguably,if your site already uses google fonts,putting cloudflare between google and users reduces the amount of tracking users are exposed to. One might also say how privacy conscious site owners should avoid both google and cloudflare.
The user's browser downloads the font off of Google's server, which gives Google their IP address, and the browser also tells Google's server what webpage it's currently visiting, via the HTTP referer.
And given that almost every webpage ships something from Google, Google has an almost complete browsing history for every public IP. There's generally multiple devices behind one public IP, especially for corporate networks or VPNs, so they still have to demultiplex that with further tracking, e.g. Google Analytics, Chrome Sync, Android, but that's rarely a problem either, as even if you're carefully avoiding these, everyone else under your public IP using them would be enough to single you out.
> One thing I was initially worried about was having to modify the “content-length” response header from the original response since we are modifying the content. Luckily, the worker takes care of that automatically and it isn’t something you have to implement.
If the worker is able to do this for you it’s clearly waiting for all of the incoming data to be processed before it begins sending to the browser, so dealing with the incoming data as chunks is actually needlessly complex.
You can also just download the ttf files, and run them through a web font generator w/ proper support for hinting, etc... and then you'll have all of the formats you need.
I mean, it's one thing to talk about what Google's technically capable of, and quite another for it to be legal.
No end user ever gets to see Google's privacy policy before their data is submitted to Google. Not even for Google Analytics, where I am pretty sure that Google does use the data, if the webpage owner isn't paying.
At the same time, Google will point to webpage owners, saying that they need to inform their users (which they do), but if Google wanted to "do the right thing", they would acknowledge that clearly webpage owners don't do that, and that therefore essentially any usage of Google Analytics data happens without user consent.
Under the GDPR, something like this would almost certainly not be legal and Google would be responsible, too, even if they're not the "controller", just the "processor", as the GDPR calls it.
Of course, we'll only know for sure once the lawsuits against Google have gone through.