In some browsers, most notably Firefox, you may see a barely noticeable ‘blink’ (a.k.a. Flash Of Unstyled Content) before the real font loads in. This is a result of Firefox’s handling of the @font-face rule.
sIFR is a workaround which uses Javascript, Flash and CSS to replace the given text with small Flash files. The lengthy processing times involved make it unsuitable for longer texts. Cufón, on the other hand is a Javascript package that draws type outlines.
Up until now, if you wanted to use fonts on a website you were limited to one of the dozen or so ‘web-safe’ fonts (Verdana, Times, Helvetica—you know, the ones you see everywhere on the web).
