WordPress contributors have updated the legacy default themes to bundle Google Fonts locally in the folder, instead of loading them from Google's servers.
In years past, loading fonts from the Google CDN was the recommended practice for performance reasons, and new privacy concerns have emerged following German court case, which fined owner for violating GDPR by using Google-hosted webfonts, .
All of the default themes from Twenty Twelve to Twenty Seventeen have been updated.
Updates to default themes are done coordination with major and minor releases of WordPress, as Jonathan Desrosiers explained in the ticket...
The reason the updates are coordinated is that the themes are updated to be compatible with new versions of WordPress, so releasing at the time makes lot of sense, ..
Also, the number of contributors that focus on the tickets within Bundled Themes component is very low these compatibility issues being addressed...
dev note to accompany these updates to the legacy default themes was published to WordPress.org.
It contains code examples for serving stylesheet from the directory, fixing the editor style within custom theme-setup function, removing the stylesheet, and including custom set of fonts in theme.
This change impacts those who have edited or removed the in theme of these default themes or plugin..
WordPress Themes Team has urged theme authors to switch to hosted webfonts, and is expected to ban hosted fonts following WordPress legacy default themes getting updated..
Read more
Related items:
