Today, Zeldman issued an ultimatum that we’ve all been feeling recently:

Chrome needs to support @font-face immediately. — Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) September 25, 2009

It’s true, every major browser supports @font-face:

Internet Explorer: since IE5

Firefox: since FF3.5

Safari: since Safari 3.2

Opera: since Opera 10

But.. Google Chrome currently does not enable @font-face linking to ttf and otf.

It actually does support SVG fonts in a @font-face declaration. View this demo in Chrome or Chromium to see svg fonts in action. Divya has some great research around fonts and SVG if you’re interested in more.

You can turn it on, at will

You can enable web fonts with an executable switch: −−enable-remote-fonts .

On Windows, you can tweak the shortcut path, like so. With Chromium on OS X, you use Terminal to launch:

1 /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-remote-fonts

With proper Google Chrome on OS X, you need to escape the spaces:

1 /Applications/Google \ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google \ Chrome --enable-remote-fonts

With Chromium on Linux[1]:

1 chromium-browser --enable-plugins --enable-remote-fonts %U

Once you enable it, all @font-face stuff works just as you’d expect, including the bulletproof @font-face syntax [demo] and the Nice Web Type demos.

But we need web fonts working by default

Wait, so why is this wonderful feature disabled by default? Security review. Ian Fette, the program manager of Chrome, indicated that they need to explore how do webfonts in a “reasonably safe manner”. So that’s the holdup. This ticket on the Chromium bug tracker tracks the feature being enabled by default.

Okay, so when do we get our toy? Soon, in fact!

Chrome is my default browser, so my patience on this issue ran dry recently. I emailed Takuya, an engineer at Google Japan, who is working on this and he said:

We are almost done. The code is under review internally within Google. I’m expecting to make it public no later than a week or so.

So I expect we’ll be seeing @font-face support enabled by default in the Chrome dev builds soon. Based on their release schedule I think it’ll be near the end of the year when we see it in Chrome stable. That’s good news; let’s hope we see it sooner.