First, my default fonts look great because I chose them and my preferences are superior to everyone else's.

Second, I use Debian and I have a fonts.conf that's hundreds of lines long, including dozens of lines of hinting settings because I prefer that some fonts use hintfull and others use hintslight. I don't have hinting settings for every font that exists, only fonts I installed, so when a site uses a web font, there is no dedicated hinting setting for it in my fonts.conf, and so it almost always looks worse than my default font.

That's cool, but you do realize you're the 0.001%, right?

Meh. I'll take "looking crummy" over waiting 30 seconds to read someone's ad-filled essay on whatever.

Fonts are 20 kb each. Even on the slowest of mobile connections, they hardly make a difference. If you're waiting 30 seconds, fonts are not the bottleneck.

If you have a few fonts, referenced by an external css file, on a page that has a bunch of images, the delay is a couple of seconds on a mobile connection. It's not just the download time for 20kb, it's the servers response time (you _are_ hosting it yourself right?) × number of resources requested.

I'd rather just view the page with the default fonts rather than wait 5-6 secondsfor the minimally different sans serif font that you've chosen for one paragraph that blocks the entire page render.

Even on the absolute slowest connection, it takes less than that for my 4 font variants to load.

You might be able to load the fonts quickly on their own but if they're requested by something else that's dynamically loaded the (serialized) round trips can add up fast, especially on high latency connections like satellite.

"But think of the satellite connections" isn't really a meaningful consideration in a world where we don't support IE and most websites are megabytes in side. Mine is fast enough for people stuck in the underground, which is a far more significant demographic for me.

Hypotheticals aside, the fonts load sufficiently fast in a single round trip (two if HTTP2 push isn't supported), and do not block rendering.

That font cache is just using 3rd-party hosted fonts like Google Fonts.

if you read the article, you will know that it works anymore like a "font cache".

*don't work anymore

*doesn’t work anymore