How to Serve Fonts from Different Servers for Ie Users

How to serve fonts from different servers for IE users?

Here's a way to do it with conditional comments. I don't know how your fonts and other styles are organized, but you'll probably want to use

<!--[if IE 9]>
    stylesheet using internally served fonts
<![endif]-->

and maybe

<!--[if !IE]> -->
    stylesheet using CDN
<!-- <![endif]-->

The latter will apply not only to non-IE browsers but also to IE10 and up, but you might only need to use the former.

To answer your first question, I prefer using fonts from my own servers when in production. Cuts down on the number of moving parts and means that my site doesn't rely on another site.

How to make Google Fonts work in IE?

The method, as indicated by their technical considerations page, is correct - so you're definitely not doing anything wrong. However, this bug report on Google Code indicate that there is a problem with the fonts Google produced for this, specifically the IE version. This only seems to affect only some fonts, but it's a real bummmer.

The answers on the thread indicate that the problem lies with the files Google's serving up, so there's nothing you can do about it. The author suggest getting the fonts from alternative locations, like FontSquirrel, and serving it locally instead, in which case you might also be interested in sites like the League of Movable Type.

N.B. As of Oct 2010 the issue is reported as fixed and closed on the Google Code bug report.

IE9 blocks download of cross-origin web font

IE9 supports .WOFF; IE8 does not, and supports only .EOT fonts.

Open the IE9 F12 Developer Tools and you see the following messages:

CSS3117: @font-face failed cross-origin request. Resource access is restricted. 
Neuton-webfont.woff

CSS3117: @font-face failed cross-origin request. Resource access is restricted. 
YanoneKaffeesatz-Regular-webfont.woff

CSS3114: @font-face failed OpenType embedding permission check. Permission must be Installable. 
Neuton-webfont.ttf

CSS3114: @font-face failed OpenType embedding permission check. Permission must be Installable. 
YanoneKaffeesatz-Regular-webfont.ttf

Examining your HTTP headers, it's clear that your cross-domain access is not configured properly, as there is no Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header on your WOFF files. They're also delivered with the wrong MIME type (text/plain) although that's not causing your problem. However, failure to map woff to the correct MIME type can cause problems as some servers will not serve files with "undefined" extensions and will instead return a HTTP/404 error.

@font-face works in IE8 but not IE9

No answer, just confirmation: I have a similar kind of problem. Font works in all other IE versions except IE9, both using IETester and original browser. When changing Document Mode (F12 dev tools) font works. Not how I'd like it though.

Update: With some trickery I managed to get it working. Seems like IE9 is using the .woff version of the font (which I had excluded) over the .eot that I thought it would. I used the @font-face generator from fontsquirrel to get all the different font variations and included them in my project, using the smileyface-local. Did not have to alter my .htaccess file. Now works fine and looks the same in all IE versions:

@font-face {
  font-family: "LucidaFax-bold";
  src: url("_font/LucidaFax-bold.eot");
  src: local("☺"),
  url("_font/LucidaFax-bold.woff") format("woff"),
  url("_font/LucidaFax-bold.ttf") format("truetype"),
  url("_font/LucidaFax-bold.svg#LucidaFax-bold") format("svg");
  }

h1 { font-family: "LucidaFax-bold", serif;}

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(I even got mad fresh using Mark "Tarquin" Wilton-Jones' text-shadow hack, applying same look to IE versions as rest of the browser world. Old school? Looks great! Was it worth it? Well, learned a lot. ;)

On IE CSS font-face works only when navigating through inner links

I found a solution but I cannot see the reason why it works (well, only one reason - it's IE :D).

What I did was to put the same site on Apache and test again. On Apache the fonts worked fine even when using Refresh button. Then in the network inspector I saw that Apache is returning 304 instead of 200 for the eot file and it hit me - so it's caching issue. I went to my ASP.NET app and sure enough - for security reasons (and also to avoid caching AJAX requests) someone had disabled every caching you could imagine:

        // prevent caching for security reasons
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory(false);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(-1));
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(false);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetRevalidation(HttpCacheRevalidation.AllCaches);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetNoServerCaching();

        // do not use any of the following two - they break CSS fonts on IE
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetNoStore();

As soon as I commented out the last two lines of code, suddenly fonts started to work without problems on IE. So I guess the answer is: IE cannot load the font if it is not cached. I have no idea why the problem happens only when refreshing/navigating back, though.

Edit - Alternative solution

Instead of commenting those last two lines

    // do not use any of the following two - they break CSS fonts on IE
    HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
    HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetNoStore();

Change the SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory to true instead:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory(true);

This should still allow no-cache with the exception of back and forward navigation as I understand it.
MSDN - SetAllowResponseInBrowserHistory Method

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