I'm a web developer that implementes designs given to me. Most often in modern times they include custom fonts. I always just ignore this and go with the closest system-available equivalent font.
Reasons:
- Delayed rendering of text (as per OP's link)
- adds a considerable extra payload to download before the page is rendered.
- UX and responsiveness on a site is way more important than the first impression of a nice font IMO. Yes, I agree fonts can help readability, but the standard fonts are not that bad.
Yes, this is true. But it seems that many custom fonts are not designed for being rendered in a browser.
Recently, I have seen pages using fonts which look blurred, fuzzy or have a weird shape. These fonts are used for the main content (copy text). There must be people who notice that this is hard to read, but nobody seems to say anything. Some days ago I was told that "it looks expensive".
I am also affected by occasional browser and OS freezing due to webfonts. The freezing may last for an eternity (subjective) and is accompanied by an intense feeling that I have lost control. A user experience can't be worse.
Often times there is a modern web friendly replacement. I've got an idiot designer who specified Grotseque MT designed in 1926. It breaks up, doesn't scale well over pixels. Even the photoshop mockups looked jittery. I've swapped it for Adelle Sans. He wouldn't even have noticed, they are close enough.
It could be that the fonts you saw render better on one platform or another. Windows and OS X render text differently enough that it happens sometimes.
Reasons: - Delayed rendering of text (as per OP's link) - adds a considerable extra payload to download before the page is rendered. - UX and responsiveness on a site is way more important than the first impression of a nice font IMO. Yes, I agree fonts can help readability, but the standard fonts are not that bad.