I'm curious. If visitors visit a site using a font served by Google fonts and visit another using the same font, will it use the cache from the browser?
because if yes, then i rather let the font served by Google fonts.
because if yes, then i rather let the font served by Google fonts.
In my testing on slow connections, serving fonts from Google's site generally results in missing text on iOS devices and Safari if the cache is cold.
By inlining a woff font in the stylesheet you take a bigger hit on the first request to your site (~110kB for my site with three web fonts), but you never see the missing text. Because I'm inlining this in my CSS, I can ensure that it's strongly cached for return visitors and they pay this only once.
It's all a tradeoff that you have to judge for yourself: "What are the chances that a given user has a specific font that you've decided to use cached?" vs "What experience do you want the user to have on a cold cache".