Products · Product
Google Fonts
Raised as a usability problem by 36 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 24 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Text stays invisible on slow connections until font downloadsUnreviewed
20102026- Text stays invisible for seconds, making browsing slow for proxy users2021-12-07
- Pages jump around or stay blank for ages while fonts load on slow connections2021-05-04
- Text stays invisible on slow connections until the font downloads or three seconds pass2019-02-21
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 37 complaints
- Clicking the page freezes the browser for a second2025-12-19
- Page is sluggish, shows blank screens, and back button stops working2025-12-19
- Geometric font is hard to read for body text in UX2025-12-12
- Importing Google web fonts properly is too annoying, so the commenter removed them2025-07-28
- Can't find a way to remove the slashed zero in the preview2024-09-17
- Cookie dialog is covered by bottom navigation on mobile, so it can't be dismissed2023-09-09
- Bottom navigation covers the cookie banner and the language selector fights the keyboard, closing everything2023-09-09
- Browsing fonts by visual style makes Chrome become completely unresponsive2023-06-18
- Text stays invisible for seconds, making browsing slow for proxy users2021-12-07
- Thumb hits the inner scroll area and scrolls the outer page instead, and the article length is hard to judge2021-07-18
- Much UI doesn't tell users what it does; text takes a third of screen width2021-07-17
- Pages jump around or stay blank for ages while fonts load on slow connections2021-05-04
- Can't find the feature to preview selected fonts together on one page2021-03-03
- Blocking web fonts leaves UI symbols unrendered and text overlapping2020-05-29
- Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End keyboard shortcuts don't work in Firefox2020-02-19
- Text stays invisible on slow connections until the font downloads or three seconds pass2019-02-21
- Font updates silently break sites that load it from Google, with no versioning2017-11-07
- Standalone accent keys render as combining marks, confusing users of dead-key keyboards2016-10-07
- Not intuitive, so the user has to relearn it every visit2016-06-15
- Editable preview fields aren't obvious, so users must guess they can type into them2016-06-15
- Duplicate pages for the same font; search shows an old link that just redirects2016-06-15
- Not obvious that you must click Select to use a font, or that the notification is clickable2016-06-14
- Font size slider jumps in big steps, no way to type an exact size2016-06-14
- Takes minutes to find the copy-paste embed snippet each visit2016-06-14
- Old version's font search was hard to use, prompting a custom replacement2016-06-14
- Right-click to open a font in a new tab is blocked2016-06-14
- Clicking font entries can't be opened in new tabs, breaking normal browsing2016-06-14
- Can't middle-click specimens to open them in a new tab2016-06-14
- Two side-by-side scrollbars on small screens; each scrolls the opposite panel, which is counterintuitive2016-06-14
- Scroll effects break the scrollbar, and blockers force repeated 'Temporarily Allow' clicks2015-06-04
- Google Fonts load slowly, making pages sluggish to display2015-02-21
- Newer web fonts look blurry and are hard to read at body-text sizes2014-11-09
- Scroll bar is hijacked and clicked elements enlarge with a glow, disrupting normal browsing2014-07-16
- Bold and italic text looks wrong unless bold and italic font variants are explicitly imported2014-01-19
- Forced installer prompts make adding fonts more painful than manual downloading2013-05-01
- Font loading causes an annoying flash and latency on dev machine2012-09-24
- No way to reach the configuration page from the font page; user had to search history2010-05-20