Cloudflare has taken on Google online after announcing that Cloudflare Fonts can improve the privacy and speed of website fonts.
The new tool is set up so that sites that use Google Fonts can load their fonts from the site’s own domain, instead of that of rival company Google.
Cloudflare calls speed and performance a key selling point, as fonts don’t need to be loaded through third-party servers, which it says will reduce time spent on DNS lookups and TLS connections.
Is Cloudflare Fonts better than Google Fonts?
Cloudflare admits that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the way Google Fonts works, as it’s incredibly easy to include royalty-free fonts with some basic HTML editing.
The problem, Cloudflare says, is speed. The company notes that the CSS is on one domain (fonts.googleapis.com), while the font files are on another domain (fonts.gstatic.com).
According to the blog post, “getting a font from Google’s servers to a browser requires eight round trips” to third-party servers. Conversely, using Cloudflare Fonts promises to reduce this to just one round trip.
The company also noted that Google “has the potential to collect a range of data, including IP addresses… formatted descriptions of the browser and operating system… the page on which to display the Google font… and how often each IP address requests for Googling.”
Cloudflare Fonts serve websites from their own domain, eliminating the need to send requests to third-party domains.
If news of a pretty serious Google Fonts rival has you thinking about your website, you can read the company’s announcement for more details. All Cloudflare customers will have access to the new tool starting in October.