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Comment by thismat | Hacker News Reader

3.3mb for a font used for headers across the site, or getting that much or more (as the site scales) from the images needed, or generated, or flash used replacement, et cetera.

It seems like a lot, but if it caches, it would probably end up being less overhead.

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I'm not sure if that matters too much - it takes over a second for those to load on my (broadband) connection. That means the page first renders with standard fonts, then snaps into the fancy downloaded ones a second after load. It feels horrible.

What browser are you using? I'm on Safari 4 and the page looked like this http://i31.tinypic.com/mvmgx0.png until the font was downloaded (took almost 10 seconds on my slow connection).

Edit: I tried it with Firefox and it does indeed use the default font until the new one is downloaded. The transition is not nice but better than nothing.

Was using FF3.5, sorry for not pointing it out earlier.

Well, I can definitely agree with you on that, the initial load was really uncomfortable. I was talking about total overhead input/output though, would likely be less if it caches, instead of having a slew of flash/images to handle it...though you could argue the flash/images would be in a lot less "burst" and you'd have to hit x number of pages to exceed the threshold.

In any case, to me it's just really more fluff, and not likely to be really usable for a long time to come...just like things like rounded corners in CSS are fun, but a narrow solution when you have to support IE6...and yes, a lot of us still HAVE to support it. I won't turn down a job just because they have that requirement, just have to adjust my expectations.

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