The amount of mis-information about FontAwesome is incredible.
One of their competitors even claims FontAwesome version 4.7 is designed at 14px and any size above that will appear fuzzy. What a load of garbage.
One of the reasons to use FontAwesome is that it is a FONT ... that means it can be rendered at any size. It's a vector and quality does not increase or decrease based on size. It will be just as sharp at 14px as 140px. Above is a screen shot of the Facebook logo generated by FontAwesome (on the 4.7.0 cheatsheet). This is the actual size. And you can view the FontAwesome page with that very icon live.
I have used FontAwesome version 4.7.0 for years. I gave up on later versions ... the overall size and shift to free/paid versions didn't appeal to me at all.
There are more modern versions of icon fonts ... many popularized as lighter stroked versions. That's not really that important. Icon fonts should be nothing more than support for other text. In the case of social media icons, the icon replaces the text. You really can't fiddle that much with a social media icon: it's the logo of the social media company.
As I pointed out in a previous article, I am concerned about the overall size of the FontAwesome 4.7.0 package. All the file sizes I mention here will be the smallest (minified if available) possible. The FontAwesome 4.7.0 CSS file is 31Kb ... in it, it lists six different fonts totally 1062Kb (1.062Mb). It's been awhile since I looked into these six font variants ... the answer that made sense (a few years back) is that the correct variant will be loaded based on the system and browser needs. That no longer makes any sense. I looked into making some changes to my overall data stream sent to a browser page request. I ended up creating a custom version of FontAwesome 4.7.0. Here's the changes and reasons why:
- I now only include the "woff2" variant of the font. I initially had some reservations about include only one single variant until I had a look at the FontAwesome 6.5.2 package. By CDN or by download, all you get is the "ttf" and "woff2" versions. And, "ttf" is useless as a webfont - it's for desktops. My customization now only includes the "woff2" variant.
- I modified the default font size from 14px to 16px. I must admit, this is strictly my personal opinion ... but we need to view larger font sizes. The days of cramming data onto a screen are gone (Yay!) ... part of that is because the screens are larger and pixel density is higher. A 14px font size appears a lot smaller today because of those two attributes – 16px as the default now makes it appear like it did back in 2016/17.
End result: I no longer use CDN for FontAwesome, I include my custom CSS and single font on the server. The package is now only a total of 106Kb. It used to be 1093Kb. My custom version is less than 1/10 the size.
By the way, the total package for FontAwesome 5.15.4 (using minimized versions where possible) is 2925Kb (almost 3Mb) and the total package for FontAwesome 6.5.2 (also minimized) is 1094Kb. These are the free versions, by the way. The paid versions are much larger.
I'll stick with my customized version of FontAwesome 4.7.0. I get all the free fonts with 675 icons. That's quite a bit more than I need: and again, my customized version is a total of 106Kb.