Disabling web fonts is one of the best things I've done for my browsing experience. The amount of hacks and workarounds people employ to prevent the text of their site jumping around is almost comical.
I'm sure the designers here will have great explanations why my operating system fonts don't fit their brand and how it's crucial that the curly bit on the r has the exact shape and how the size of the period is a critical part of the web page layout but I'm happy to just put all that crap aside. Sometimes a website looks janky as hell because nobody bothered testing if the fallback fonts had even remotely the same shape, but that's mostly on overdesigned advertisements I don't really care about anyway.
The only downside is that some websites use web fonts as a replacement for iconography, putting random words alll over the place when you disable web fonts. I wish I could just whitelist icon fonts while still disabling designer cruft.
>The only downside is that some websites use web fonts as a replacement for iconography, putting random words alll over the place when you disable web fonts. I wish I could just whitelist icon fonts while still disabling designer cruft.
Yeah, I browse with a lot of NoScript and other blockers, and icon fonts often turn into little square boxes of "cant' display" or wierd characters. If the designers had actually put something on it that said what the icon meant, eg "share on twitter" or "about us" well, that would have been pretty useful.
It strongly implies a lack of testing, using semantic markup, and not complying with accessibility standards ... which makes for a poorer experience for many people, and a loss of machine-readability (isn't SEO important anymore?)
With the right ARIA labels, accessibility shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I've found out that uBlock Origin has a setting that can block web fonts by default. This also allows me to unblock them on broken websites, so that's better than using the web font browser setting at least.
I'm sure the designers here will have great explanations why my operating system fonts don't fit their brand and how it's crucial that the curly bit on the r has the exact shape and how the size of the period is a critical part of the web page layout but I'm happy to just put all that crap aside. Sometimes a website looks janky as hell because nobody bothered testing if the fallback fonts had even remotely the same shape, but that's mostly on overdesigned advertisements I don't really care about anyway.
The only downside is that some websites use web fonts as a replacement for iconography, putting random words alll over the place when you disable web fonts. I wish I could just whitelist icon fonts while still disabling designer cruft.