Showing nothing for 3 seconds beats just using the fallback and switching when the download finishes?
It's great you collected data, but I think the working hypothesis is flawed.
It's great you collected data, but I think the working hypothesis is flawed.
I added a Feedback drawer to the top of my site. Javascript would determine the height of the drawer then set the top position equal to the inverse of it's height. That way the drawer was completely hidden.
However when a font was loaded the height of the drawer changes and then you've got it sticking down over of the top of the page.
These kinds of things are really frustrating. I'd like to see the page not display until the fonts are loaded and I'd like to see Chrome start shipping with some of the more common web fonts included.
A lot of the problem is poorly implemented web fonts that are not optimized, or web designers going crazy and including 6-8 different font/weight combinations. Having half a meg of web fonts download is no different than using way too many images that are not compressed enough.