"I'm not sure I agree that "it only takes *a* site to take one for the team" as there's no guarantee that once a font is downloaded how long it will stay in the cache - we're building sites that consume more and more cache, and using many different fonts from many different foundries. Not sure I follow the bigger question of when browsers are going to become more responsible - originally browsers didn't block waiting for the font and display the page anyway until we (devs and designers) complained we didn't like the experience it gave our visitors, so instead they started waiting for font. Ilya's got an interesting proposal to allow us to have greater level of control, but we'll still have a challenge when we choose to use a font - https://github.com/igrigorik/c..." - Andy Davies