Cloudflare launches new fight against Google over…fonts?

Cloudflare has taken its fight against Google online after announcing that Cloudflare Fonts can enhance website fonts privacy and speed.

The new tool is set to allow sites that use Google Fonts to load their fonts from the site’s own domain, rather than from rival company Google’s.

Cloudflare touts speed and performance as a key selling point, because fonts won’t need to be loaded using third-party servers, which it says will reduce the time spent on DNS lookups and TLS connections.

Is Cloudflare Fonts better than Google Fonts?

Cloudflare admits that there’s nothing inherently wrong with how Google Fonts works, as such, given that it’s incredibly easy to incorporate royalty-free fonts with some basic HTML editing.

The problem, Cloudflare says, is speed. The company notes that the CSS resides on one domain (fonts.googleapis.com) while the font files reside on another domain (fonts.gstatic.com).

According to the blog post, “getting a font from Google servers to a browser requires eight round trips” to the third-party servers. Conversely, using Cloudflare Fonts promises to cut this down to just one round trip.

The company also noted that Google “has the potential to accumulate a range of data, including IP addresses… formatted descriptions of the browser and operating system… the page on which the Google font is to be displayed… and how often each IP makes requests to Google.”

Cloudflare Fonts serve websites from their own domain, which eliminates the need to send requests to third-party domains.

If the news of a pretty serious Google Fonts rival has got you thinking about your website, you can read the company’s announcement for more details. All Cloudflare customers are set to get access to the new tool from October.

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