DigitalSandbox

Anyone who designs for the web learns quickly that font choice is sorely lacking. If you want to use a non-standard font you have only one option. You must replace that text with an image of that text in your font of choice. This has led to some truly genius techniques like sIFR (used here on this site) and similar server-side programs that generate the images for you, but these techniques each have their own quirks and limitations, making them suitable for use only when absolutely necessary.

That was why I was so excited for browsers to start supporting the @font-face property, allowing us to download a font to the user’s system for use on our site. Safari was the first to support it (for TrueType and OpenType fonts) and I was hopeful that other browsers would add this feature soon. The release of Google Chrome had me especially hopeful since it was based on WebKit (the same as Safari).

Alas, after some quick testing, it would appear that we will have to keep on waiting. Safari is still the only browser to support @font-face. Google Chrome doesn’t (still in beta so there’s hope for the official release), Firefox is a no-go (planned for Firefox 3.1, so we’re close), and Opera has not added support (planned for version 10). Interestingly, IE has supported this since version 5, but only in their own proprietary format. I haven’t heard anything, but maybe they will surprise us with IE 8 and support TrueType and OpenType formats finally. Looks like sIFR will be King of the Hill for a bit longer.