Cloudflare recently launched the Cloudflare Fonts font platform, which is said to have “faster element call speed” and “higher privacy” than the Google Fonts platform. The platform is expected to be launched in October this year.
After inquiries, it was learned that Google Fonts is an open-source font platform created by Google. It provides a large number of web font elements for designers and developers to reference in web pages. Developers can first add relevant font links to HTML web pages, and then Use CSS to specify which elements should use the specified font.
Google Fonts currently provides 1,562 fonts and is the world’s most popular web font platform, with a market share of nearly 90%, followed by Adobe Fonts, reaching 12%.
Cloudflare’s launch of Cloudflare Fonts this time is intended to challenge the status of Google Fonts. Cloudflare claims that users do not have to load fonts from third-party servers provided by Google, thereby “enhancing user privacy”. Also due to the platform’s DNS lookup and TLS The time is shorter than that of Google, so the response time of websites using Cloudflare Fonts font elements is shorter.
According to Cloudflare’s test, when using the Google Fonts platform, the web page’s response speed (First Contentful Paint) is 0.9 seconds, but after enabling the Cloudflare Fonts platform, the web page’s response speed increases to 0.3 seconds.
Cloudflare stated in this regard that users loading Google Fonts involves HTML and CSS. To obtain a font from the Google server, the browser needs to go through steps such as “DNS search”, “establishing a link”, “HTTPS TLS process”, and requesting corresponding resources. , there will be a total of 8 round trips. Cloudflare Fonts significantly reduces the number of round trips to one, thereby improving the website’s response speed.