I've been slowly adding the contents of Google Fonts into my system fonts storage as I see them used on sites that I visit often. Things like Open Sans and Roboto for instance are quite common.
I think there would probably be a good case for an extension to automate that in some fashion for fonts with known open licenses (essentially anything from Google Fonts, for example) to go ahead and just install them into the system.
There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.
You might not care, but as an FYI that can be used to fingerprint your browser more accurately.
And if you are a developer, make sure you correctly test your site on machines that DO NOT have the fonts installed, as the browser won't even try to load them if it already has them, and you'll likely never find any bugs related to that until it's too late.
Those are fair points. Probably my ideal solution would involve an LRU cache (and not installing it on development machines and/or easy to spin up fresh VMs for load testing).
> There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.
Assuming they're using pure CSS for the font loading (which is standard for Google's CDN), yes, the browser will use a local copy in preference. (There's a way to disable that in CSS's font spec, although it's hard to think of a good use for that.)
Browsers try to load local fonts before remote fonts. At least anecdotally I've never seen a Google Font/Google CDN font bypass a local font, at least not with the default Google Fonts CSS code.
I think there would probably be a good case for an extension to automate that in some fashion for fonts with known open licenses (essentially anything from Google Fonts, for example) to go ahead and just install them into the system.
There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install all of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.