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Interesting, it appears to be serving @font-face fonts with browser-specific stylesheets. Firefox gets a tag with src: local('name'), while IE doesn't. More details here: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/technical_consider...

This server-side logic makes it more than just a font-face repository like I initially assumed. If you feel like rolling your own and not using Google's, you can easily download font-face kits from fontsquirrel.com.

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A very important advantage is that the browser can cache the stylesheet and the font, and can reuse them across multiple websites.

So if your website uses a font that is used by another website which the user has already visited, the browser doesn't need to download the font again. It doesn't even need to check the modification date on Googles server.

As many fonts add ~100 KB to the download size for a page, this really makes a difference.

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