Re: @font-face and slow downloading

Hi Beth,

> The summary is this: Currently, WebKit doesn't display any text until
> the resource has downloaded, but when a resource takes a really long
> time to download, the failure to display any text for so long is
> confusing and a bad user experience. Firefox chooses to display a
> fallback font right away, and then flashes to the @font-face font once
> it has finished downloading. This FOUC is not a particularly pleasant
> user experience either, and based on the activity in the bug, it looks
> like the Mozilla folks want to tweak it.
>
> The summary is this: Currently, WebKit doesn't display any text until
> the resource has downloaded, but when a resource takes a really long
> time to download, the failure to display any text for so long is
> confusing and a bad user experience. Firefox chooses to display a
> fallback font right away, and then flashes to the @font-face font once
> it has finished downloading. This FOUC is not a particularly pleasant
> user experience either, and based on the activity in the bug, it looks
> like the Mozilla folks want to tweak it.

Right, I think the question is what the delay should be.  Too long and
the viewer doesn't see the text of a page for a slow loading font, too
soon and you get a "double pop", white to fallback, then fallback to
downloaded.

Which behavior is worse, popping vs. no text, is somewhat a user
preference, so it would be nice to allow users to vary this to their
choosing and to match their network environment (i.e. slow/fast network).

I think we could put suggested behavior into the spec but I'm not sure
it would make sense to *require* a certain delay for example.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 12 October 2010 14:27:18 UTC