github-real-icons

This userstyle replaces GitHub’s font-based icons with real PNGs.

Deprecation notice

I have abandoned this idea because of maintenance burdens.

The motivation for this style was:

• Many web designers replace the body text font face with a web font. This makes text hard to read.
• Therefore, block web font downloads or configure the browser to disregard all font faces specified by sites.
• But, some sites use web fonts for icons. These include GitHub.
• Therefore, write this userstyle.

This used to work except for two points:

• Whenever GitHub adds an icon, the style needs to be updated. The process is non-trivial.
• The number of sites that (1) use icon fonts and (2) are too useful to ignore is rising. It is no longer feasible to prepare a userstyle for each.

There are alternative ways to avoid designer typefaces:

• Document Font Toggle puts a button on the toolbar that can be toggled to allow or disallow site fonts. Additionally, it has a configurable whitelist of sites that are always allowed to specify fonts.
• AdBlock Plus can block web fonts that are not embedded in CSS as data: URLs. One can then add exceptions for known icon fonts.
• Using Stylish, one can selectively replace fonts commonly used by designers with a locally installed font.