chore: remove unused Google Fonts links#2714
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Open Sans and Material Icons were loaded from fonts.googleapis.com but neither font is referenced by font-family anywhere in the application: - Open Sans was last used as the Foundation body font — removed in 2022 when Foundation was deleted during the Bootstrap 5 migration - Material Icons was added in 2019 and never referenced in any CSS Font Awesome 5 is already self-hosted via the font_awesome5_rails gem. Plausible analytics is also self-hosted. Removing these two tags eliminates all external font requests, resolving the GDPR concern with no visual change.
mroderick
marked this pull request as ready for review
July 16, 2026 13:05
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In preparing for adopting better security headers, I discovered that these fonts are unused and dead weight (and a privacy concern).
Problem
Two Google Fonts are loaded from
fonts.googleapis.cominapp/views/layouts/application.html.haml:/css?family=Open+Sans:400,300)/icon?family=Material+Icons)This triggers requests to
fonts.googleapis.com(serves@font-faceCSS) andfonts.gstatic.com(serves the actual font files), which is a GDPR concern — user IPs and user-agent data are sent to Google without consent.We investigated whether Fontsource or another approach was needed, but the fonts turned out to be fully unused.
Investigation
Both fonts are unreferenced in any CSS
font-family: 'Open Sans'in SCSS/CSSfont-family: 'Material Icons'in SCSS/CSS@font-facedeclarationsBootstrap 5 uses a system font stack (
system-ui, -apple-system, ...). No custom$font-family-*overrides exist in the project SCSS.Git history confirms they're dead
Open Sans
$body-font-familyin Foundation (foundation_and_overrides.scss)36758d5e). Last CSS reference removed.Material Icons
<link>added to layout (15a70da3)Font Awesome 5 is already self-hosted via the
font_awesome5_railsgem — no CDN issue.Plausible analytics is also self-hosted (
/js/script.js,/api/event) — no GDPR concern.Change
Removed two
<link>tags fromapp/views/layouts/application.html.haml. That's it — no visual change, no regression risk on the rendering front.GDPR Risk Resolved
fonts.googleapis.com@font-faceCSSfonts.gstatic.com.woff2font files