Download websites that use Cufon

About Cufon

Headlines on a page running Cufon are not text. The library took a typeface, converted the letterforms into shapes, and drew them with canvas or the older vector markup that early browsers understood, all to solve a problem that no longer exists, which was showing a typeface the browser could not load. Native font embedding in CSS made the whole approach unnecessary, and the project has been unmaintained for a long time.

What survives is the interesting part. As of September 2026 we still detect Cufon on 50,927 sites, with United States contributing 17,708 and .com carrying most of the addresses. A page still relying on script based font replacement has almost certainly not had its front end rebuilt since the technique was current, so the list works less as a Font scripts inventory and more as a census of neglected web properties.

Neglect is a commercial signal, and different buyers read it differently. A redesign agency sees a qualified pipeline of businesses whose sites visibly predate the mobile web, sortable by country and suffix. A security researcher sees a front end frozen at a vintage that usually sits on a content management system and a server generation frozen with it. Somebody valuing a domain portfolio sees the opposite of what a live business looks like. An accessibility auditor sees text painted into a canvas, which behaves badly for screen readers and for anyone trying to select, search or translate a page.

The technical facts are thin and worth stating plainly. Release came in 2009 under the MIT license, the code is JavaScript, and no company stands behind it, which was normal for a single developer project of that era. No version breakdown appears here, because the loader rarely announces a release in a form a crawler can read. Detection relies on the script name and its call signature surviving in the delivered page, so any site that bundled and renamed its scripts is missing from the count.

A per-domain lookup answers a question nobody really asks, since knowing whether one particular site carries an abandoned font library is rarely worth the query. The value sits entirely in the aggregate. A downloadable list of every site still carrying the library is a list of properties that stopped changing, which is a starting point for outreach, for research into how long dead front end code persists in production, and for anyone estimating the size of the long tail that no longer receives attention. One caveat belongs with it. A script left in a template is not proof that the font replacement still runs on the page, only proof that nobody removed it.