I don't understand why they don't just ship a huge set of fonts by default. I'm probably missing some licensing bullshit, but look at Google Fonts and all the amazing fonts there. They're called open source fonts. Is there anything stopping firefox et al from just bundling them, or at least downloading them on-demand from a trusted server (not google)?
It would be lovely if all web developers could just assume that the entirety of google fonts is at their disposal in a native way without having to resort to webfonts and the overhead that brings.
> I don't understand why they don't just ship a huge set of fonts by default.
It takes a lot of work to draw a reasonable large set of all the Unicode characters for a given language. Time is money and fonts are ridiculously expensive.
That being said, Firefox has funded a few fonts over the years but they don’t bundle them with the browser. Google has a huge collection but doesn’t bundle them either. It makes more sense with Google as it can collect user data from its WebFont as a service system.
The problem is not shipping alternative fonts, but blocking access to the system fonts. For compatibility reasons, there needs to be a mechanism to still allow access for specific websites. That’s what the planned feature linked by the parent is for.
I'd be happy to have many more resources this way, use a hash and some sort of frecency -- but we've moved away from sharing resources across sites, unfortunately.
It would be lovely if all web developers could just assume that the entirety of google fonts is at their disposal in a native way without having to resort to webfonts and the overhead that brings.