Iustin Pop/ blog/ entry/ Rant: webfonts, github, icons

Note: this is a rant.

For year, I've browsed the web with Firefox set to “Allow pages to choose their own fonts: no”. It worked everywhere very well, and I had a consistent style across pages, and I wasn't forced to see the (IMHO) very ugly Microsoft-fonts look-alikes.

That all changed until GitHub introduced their “Octicons” font, and represent icons with characters, instead of actual icons. Now I either am forced to:

  • not be able to use GitHub's web interface, or
  • allow all sites to use random font of the day, or
  • start playing with custom style-sheets and overrides and whatnot

Grr… At least they added text labels too, so at least I get a small box with F044 and label “Admin”.

comment 1
A recommendation: allow pages to use their own fonts, but locally tell fontconfig to replace any instances of the various standard fonts you don't enjoy with fonts you do.
Comment by Anonymous — early Sunday morning, May 13th, 2012
Use NoScript
With the great NoScript add-on to firefox you can allow individual sites to use web fonts, while disallowing it by default.
Comment by Anonymous — mid-morning Sunday, May 13th, 2012
Re: comment 1

Hmm, can fontconfig do that even for webfonts? I thought webfonts are purely a browser-specific issue, whereas fontconfig refers to X/ttf fonts.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it.

Comment by Iustin Pop — at lunch time on Sunday, May 13th, 2012
Re: Use NoScript
Ah, I use NoScript but I didn't know it can control font use, thanks a lot!
Comment by Iustin Pop — at lunch time on Sunday, May 13th, 2012
I wonder why they do it this way
There must be a good reason for using webfonts rather than, say, SVG. I wonder if there's a significant performance difference in some situations between the two.
Comment by directhex — in the wee hours of Sunday night, May 14th, 2012
Re: I wonder why they do it this way
Possibly. There was a (somewhat) long discussion on HN about this, but I haven't read it in depth. I just wanted to get the rant out :)
Comment by Iustin Pop — late Monday evening, May 14th, 2012
It's all about performance
Using fonts instead of svg files has a huge advantage: you can provide many icons in a single file, which is a huge performance win over other options. The concept is a bit similar to CSS sprites, but the use of fonts gives you something that scales properly.
Comment by Wichert — early Tuesday morning, May 15th, 2012
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