Hi folks -

When I was griping to my friend that works at Mozilla about my font-face woes, 
I was pointed to this bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=604421 
which ends in a suggestion to post in the forum. So, here I am, and hopefully 
this is the right place to share my experience with cross-domain fonts and 
Firefox.

I am a frontend developer at Coursera, and we use custom fonts in a few ways:
- we have custom fonts for our serif and sans-serif that we use throughout our 
websites (www.coursera.org, class.coursera.org, authentication.coursera.org, 
blog.coursera.org, etc)
- we use "Font Awesome", an icon font, also throughout our websites

When we develop our website locally, we serve our custom fonts from our local 
machines. When we deploy to live, we host our fonts on CloudFront (an Amazon 
S3-backed service for static asset delivery), and they are served from a domain 
like 34234234.coursera.org.

In Chrome, this causes no issues, and we are happy. In Firefox, however, we 
keep getting bitten by the cross-domain fonts policy.

When we first moved to CloudFront and discovered the issue, we rushed to read 
up on what header we could set, and so we used www.coursera.org. After waiting 
a few hours to invalidate the CloudFront cache, we realized that we have other 
domains, and we tried various syntaxes for getting it to be accepted at 
anything off our coursera.org domain. Eventually we gave up and decided, screw 
it, let's just use *. So, that was about a day of our time. 

Unfortunately, it didn't end there, and in total, we've spent about 3 days 
trying to get our fonts working in Firefox across all of our sites. The problem 
is that our subdomain setup and cache headers locally does not exactly match 
the subdomain setup on our staging servers which does not exactly match the 
subdomain setup on our live servers, and that means that every time something 
changes about our setup, we are liable to discover only once live that we've 
introduced an issue with our fonts in Firefox, and we have to rush to fix it 
and invalidate our caches and get our users to clear theirs.

You could argue that we should be prepared for this, and make our local 
environment better match live, but the thing is, that we don't run into this 
problem for anything besides fonts, and well, given that Chrome doesn't enforce 
the policy, it just seems silly and is quite frustrating to us. It feels like 
the developers of the world should be able to spend their time doing more 
productive things, not futzing with headers all day to get an arrow to show up 
properly.

I hope that my explanation helps with understanding the developer experience of 
someone trying to use font-face on Firefox. (And IE, but we have more users in 
FF, soooo... :)

Thank you for listening!
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform

Reply via email to