This is a fundamental problem with web design at the moment. Every designer puts their awesome looking font in, but ultimately the web browser renders what it wants, and to get a good pagespeed score you need to render local fonts.

It ends up being a trade off between performance and UI. But why can't we have both? Why can't the user say "always use x and y fonts because I know best" and give the designer the opportunity to put the fonts they want in without impacting performance.

Browsers should include popular fonts. Currently there are not enough good cross-platform fonts, that's why designers want custom fonts. Or something should be done for better caching of custom fonts, so if you've used your browser for few weeks, you won't have to load any custom font ever, because they are already cached.

Users can do that, and it is [still!] a first class (ie. not hidden in about:config, but available in preferences) configuration option in Firefox.

Part of a web design job should be testing your creation under different user selectable options. Like zoom, font selection, screens of various quality, etc. But most designers still treat web browsers, like it's a piece of paper they're in complete control over.

Don't be afraid actually read the article.

None of it is specific to custom web fonts (@font-face). Rather, it is about text spacing, indentation, justification, etc.

My personal guide about web typography:

Don't change the user's default text spacing, indentation, justification. Respect his and his system's choices.

It would be great if the system's default choices were something more reasonable than what some random Netscape engineer decided circa 1995. The user's choices? I'm sure there are dozens of users on the net who have customized their browser's default styles.

Yes, we should absolutely respect the settings in the "typography" preference pane that all browsers have, where all users lovingly set their preferred text spacing, indentation, and justification. Oh wait! There isn't one. In fact, most users not only haven't explicitly made these choices, they can't explicitly make these choices. Are you arguing that the "system's choices" are some bastion of well-considered design sensibility that we violate at our peril? Really? Nuts to that.

As much right as you have to read content as you wish, the publisher has to present it as she wishes.

This is a guide for people who want to make use of thousands of years of accrued typographic culture to get their message across usefully and beautifully.

- ed

Well, perhaps a thousand or so years. I'm unsure how deep into Roman times good 'type' style lettering stretches.

I'm willing to bet that 99% of people don't set this, and the changes are improvements.

What do you mean? Most computers on the planet have en-US Keyboards attached....

> Don't change the user's default justification.

I don't know about you, but I set all web pages to be right justified. /s

It's easy to disable loading of custom fonts in the browser and set default font to what you want. The only thing I'm missing is browser option for minimal strength of small text, because some designers just don't think about people and combine weight:200 with color:#444 or whatever for body text.

Unfortunately that is not a good option because many designers also use fonts for icons and they all display as squares.

I block fonts with uBlock and see this all the time. Usually the icons are pointless and I don't miss them. In bad cases I'll toggle fonts on and reload the page.

That's the reason they shouldn't abuse fonts to make icons, and use SVG instead, or at least use standard unicode symbols.