Privacy issue: Cannot load web app without network requests to Google Fonts servers

[Openstreetmapler]

What happened?

The web app fails to load (blank blue screen) if I block network requests to fonts.googleapis.com for loading CSS – the following error appears in the JavaScript console:

15:04:30.639 Uncaught (in promise) Error: Unable to preload CSS for /assets/index-W5adcBiJ.css
    e https://maproulette.org/assets/index-BXUzEb7b.js:2
    c https://maproulette.org/cdn-cgi/scripts/7d0fa10a/cloudflare-static/rocket-loader.min.js:1
index-BXUzEb7b.js:2:1553

Steps to reproduce

1. Configure your preferred privacy browser extension to block all requests to the domain fonts.googleapis.com
   • I’m using uMatrix with the following configuration for maproulette.org:
     
     I allowed everything first-party and also the third-party CSS from unpkg.com, but I left fonts.googleapis.com blocked due to privacy concerns.
2. Go to https://maproulette.org/

Environment

Firefox 128.0.3 on macOS

Additional information

I am very strict with myself in regards to internet privacy, especially when it comes to avoiding Google! (Further reading: Delete Google) It is sad to see that this (open-source!) web app disregards my privacy by refusing to load without communicating with Google servers!

[jake-low]

Hi @Openstreetmapler, thanks for the suggestion. We've just merged a PR (#2721) to remove Google Fonts from MapRoulette; it will be deployed in the next release.

It is sad to see that this (open-source!) web app disregards my privacy by refusing to load without communicating with Google servers!

For what it's worth, it certainly wasn't our intention for MapRoulette to refuse to load for users who choose to block requests to fonts.google.com; I'm not sure why this was happening. In fact, I wasn't aware that MapRoulette made use of Google Fonts at all, and I suspect that the other current maintainers were not either. I appreciate that you brought this to our attention.

[Openstreetmapler]

👏 Thank you a lot for this quick response and solution! There’s something new to discover every day!

[jake-low]

This change has now been deployed to production as part of release v3.17.13. MapRoulette no longer uses Google Fonts.

[Openstreetmapler]

Huge thanks for your work! Now I can use MapRoulette again, hooray!