Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

http://www.google.com/fonts?1#Analytics:total

by robinhouston • 13 years ago

80 81 13 years ago

google.com

eps6• 13 years ago

Trillion visits logged.

Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

untog• 13 years ago

Yep, like everything, it's a trade off. In return you get a very robust platform and free fonts.

pandringa• 13 years ago

In return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.

J_Darnley2• 13 years ago

My computer or more accurately the operating system came with dozens of fonts, maybe hundreds. Why can't you use one of those?

gress5• 13 years ago

A trade off implies people understand what Google is doing, which they don't because it's secret.

unknownian• 13 years ago

Is it against the TOS to download the font and host it on your own server? It's very simple to do even though they don't give instructions.

jonknee5• 13 years ago

No:

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts

putlake• 13 years ago

I am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads).

Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M

Google Fonts makes a lot of optimizations that are platform-specific. e.g. serve smaller files to Macs, larger files to Windows. It is not worth doing all this yourself.

afsina3• 13 years ago

So you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.

RexRollman2• 13 years ago

They are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.

jonknee5• 13 years ago

Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source):

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts

You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server.

Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move that along.

Update: No cookies are set by Google either, they're just doing analytics by the user agent sent. The actual font files have 1 year expires headers on them as well, so cookies would be of limited use.

loceng2• 13 years ago

Didn't realize this - thanks. :)

mehrdada• 13 years ago

Also, without accessible web fonts, developers will have to use images containing rendered texts to get text pretty on their web pages, which is not so easy to index for a search engine.

gress5• 13 years ago

Except for the fact that people don't download and serve them themselves.

eps6• 13 years ago

Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself.

Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.

byjove2• 13 years ago

Only reason huh? nothing to do with prettifying the web and making developers happy, because that doesn't benefit Google in any way...

RexRollman2• 13 years ago

Not directly it doesn't.

coldtea• 13 years ago

If they cared about that they'd keep Reader open.

darkhorn• 13 years ago

Google Fonts, Google Public DNS, Google Analytics, Google+ like gadgets, Google Adsense, Google CDN for jQuery etc, Google services like Search and Gmail, Embedded Youtube videos, Google Chrome word correction sugesstions and safe sites checks, Firefox safe page checks, probably many things within Android backend.

Probably they know with 99.9999999% accuracy how many online web users are out there.

nkuttler• 13 years ago

Considering that browsers have caches this isn't a huuuge issue.

afsina3• 13 years ago

Interesting. It is a rare thing to see that Google shares information about the Browser and OS stats.

jonknee5• 13 years ago

And that they broke out iOS (even iPhone/iPad separately), but not Android (I suspect it's in the oddly high Linux category).

gress5• 13 years ago

They didn't break out android because it would contradict the usage numbers they would like people to believe.

recuter2• 13 years ago

This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen.

Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?

afsina3• 13 years ago

I think these stats are more accurate than many others (I am looking at you Net Applications). However, Most of the popular large sites (Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, e-bay and Chinese stuff etc.) do not use Google Fonts so IE stats are skewed.

recuter2• 13 years ago

For all intents and purposes those are outliers that can be ignored anyway unless you happen to be a Top25 website yourself.

magicalist• 13 years ago

Where do you see the IE version split? I only see the browser type analytics, not split by version.

yohui• 13 years ago

There are two pie charts under "Views by platform": "Browsers" and "Browser Versions". Under versions, both "MSIE 10.0" and "MSIE 8.0" are listed.

Though assuming the two pie charts are based on the same data, I'm not sure how specific versions of Chrome and Mobile Safari have greater shares of the "Browser Versions" pie than all of their versions have in the combined "Browsers" chart.

makmanalp• 13 years ago

If you ever get lost in the tons of fonts offered, check out this curated list that I absolutely adore:

http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type

loceng2• 13 years ago

There are more like these. If I can find find them in my bookmarks, I'll paste them here.

notJim2• 13 years ago

Please look harder, I want to see!

ChrisArchitect2• 13 years ago

yeah this was a big one for me too

chj• 13 years ago

Serif fonts are going out of business?

Only one in the top 10 is Droid Serif, still dropping.

rkuykendall-com• 13 years ago

The page we're on, the page linked, my browser and OS are all 100% sans-serif.

I wouldn't say going out of business, I don't think they will ever disappear, but definitely taking a back-seat role.

timdorr• 13 years ago

A lot of this has to do with Twenty Twelve being the default theme for WordPress, which used Open Sans as its default font. Many people I've seen either use that theme or some derivative of it (myself included).

npunt2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet --

Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet.

An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what settings you have enabled. Small fixes have dropped but the fundamental issue remains.

When I first added Google Fonts to my site, I got word from several readers saying text was illegible. Thats when I discovered that tons of other designers had the same issue and it was Chrome's fault (search 'chrome windows fonts' and enjoy). I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies.

When a company espouses a newfound interest in design [2] [3], but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet.

Don't get me wrong, I love Google Fonts, it's a fantastic service for the design community. And Google has been building a lot of great design tools [4] that help push the web forward. Just.. close the loop on fonts already.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 [2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign [3] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [4] https://www.google.com/webdesigner/

visarga• 13 years ago

When a company espouses a newfound interest in design, but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet.

Same for Google Maps. I live in Romania and we have had high-rez satellite and maps of our country, including street view, but for 7+ years we haven't had GPS locations of individual house numbers.

Android being the most popular phone and Google Maps the most popular GPS/maps app in Romania, not to be able to locate a house on a long street makes it almost useless. GMaps simply points to the middle point of the street - if it is miles long, then you might be a long way from your actual destination.

Why can't a multi-billion dollar company get their act together and finish their work? Even small GPS companies sell products that can look up houses on the street, but not Google. Could it be that it is too expensive even for them, or that Romania is worthless for them to spend time to finish the job?

I raised the issue on reddit, send feedback directly to them and at one time I even met a Google Maps employee and described our frustration with the Romanian Maps to him directly, but nothing gets done. It's like we fell off the Google Map™ into "forgotten land". And it's not a minor issue, it's like the most central thing a GPS does.

Silhouette5• 13 years ago

I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies.

On a similar note, caution is needed when using Helvetica in a web font stack. On Windows PCs, this could easily select a low quality screen font that was installed with a printer driver in preference to Arial. Designers who work on Apple gear, where specifying Helvetica tends to find a standard system font that renders reasonably well, sometimes don't realize this.

npunt2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the tip, that'd be bad! Is this still the case if you have Arial as a fallback? e.g. font-family:"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;

DigitalSea2• 13 years ago

This. It's worth pointing out that the antialiasing issue only affects Windows PC's. But this is very much a font issue us developers have to hack around. -webkit-font-smoothing and setting the value to antialiased sometimes fixes this issue.

yen223• 13 years ago

The weirdest part is that, Firefox on Windows renders those fonts fine.

andypotts• 13 years ago

The only reason I came onto this article was to post this. Thank-you for saving me some time.

Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

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