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If it's such a technical difficulty, how does Opera manage to pass it still?

"Opera and Webkit implemented (very brokenly, in at least Opera’s case) a small subset of SVG 1.1 Fonts; basically just enough to pass Acid3."

Translation: We were unable to implement the same subset and now tell everyone it isn't useful in the 'real world'.

Sounds better than "It was too hard for us. Sorry."

Has anybody used SVG fonts on the Web? I'm curious.

I realize that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with browsers not supporting it, but it seems to me that the really good features start picking up traction even when only a few browsers support it (e.g. CSS transitions and animations, the latter of which Firefox still doesn't support).

If you wanted webfonts on iOS versions before 4, you had to use SVG fonts on that platform. They weren't great though, and having the choice to use TTF/OTF now is much better.

Uh... did you read the article? Did you read Robert O'Callahan's blog post it links to?

We sure can implement a broken version of SVG Fonts just to pass Acid3. We think doing that is 1) unethical and 2) bad for the web. So we're not going to do that.

It's not a technical difficulty. It's pointless, because WOFF does everything SVG fonts do, but is actually supported by font foundries and the Web in general.

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