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I recently mulled this over on a project. If you have to support multiple font formats to support a variety of browsers, I think the http request latency is less of a factor than forcing all browsers to download all formats even if they won't/can't use them. I think most sites fall into that category.

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Instead of serving all fonts to all browsers, which would be slow, you can serve different styles based on the user-agent.

User agent sniffing is unreliable and evil.

While you're right - in this case it might be perfectly acceptable to decide "I'll use unreliable user-agent sniffing to handle 80%/90%/99%/99.999% of my traffic, and accept some small cases where a slower option occasionally needs to be used, or possibly accept minor font differences on odd-ball browsers".

Old wives tale.

Not to mention there are more ways to tell apart browsers than user agent sniffing.

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