Webfonts, github, icons

Posted on May 12, 2012 with tags . See the previous or next posts.

Note: this is a rant. Be warned :)

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”.