14 DAY TRIAL // Any web designer will tell you, typography on the web has come a long way in the past few years. Whereas, for a long time, your only actual choice in fonts was serif or sans serif, there are now thousands of typefaces to choose from all easily embeddable on your site.
That said, once you get a taste of the good stuff, you want more. There are still plenty of issues with fonts on the web, especially if you're a particularly perfectionist designer.
One of the most annoying issues, that doesn't have a satisfying solution, is what to do until the font you chose is loaded. By default, browsers will first display the text using the standard local font and then change it to the font you picked, once it is loaded.
This goes unnoticed by most people, but it can be annoying if you're trying to get something to look just right.
But things are changing, Google is working on improving web font support in Chrome. The Blink engine is getting some improvements, which are being showcased by Google's Kunihiko Sakamoto in a slide.
One of the changes is a smarter way of displaying a page while the fonts are loading. Normally, you don't want to hold up the page rendering while the font is being downloaded, but you also don't want your text to be displayed with two fonts over the course of a few seconds.
Chrome's solution is to make the text invisible, i.e. transparent, until the proper font is loaded. That may still not be a perfect solution, but it's still better than what we have now. To help, Blink is also getting faster web font loading.
But it's also getting smarter about how it downloads fonts, it only does it when a font is needed in rendering, not just if it's listed in a CSS file somewhere. Also nice is support for limited unicode-range downloads. Developers can define a range of characters that they use on a site, in CSS, so that the browser only downloads a portion of the font file, with the characters needed.
Also helpful is Chrome's support for font loading events, making it possible to trigger certain behavior when a font file has definitely been loaded. Finally, Chrome is adding support for the WOFF 2.0 font format and LZMA compression. All of these last features are hidden behind a flag.