Here's the browser view of this brief interaction: http://i.imgur.com/IWFEKGt.png http://i.imgur.com/IWFEKGt.png [0] Basically, the stylesheet finished transfe

Here's the browser view of this brief interaction: http://i.imgur.com/IWFEKGt.png http://i.imgur.com/IWFEKGt.png [0] Basically, the stylesheet finished transferring and the browser followed up with laying out the page. Some data:uri requests were in flight and when they finished (200ms later) the page was laid out again and now applied the fonts. Typekit has historically detect in JavaScript when a font loads because they like to ensure the text stays invisible (across browsers) while the page hasn't finished loading the fonts. But in this case, it looks like there's a problem with either Typekit not finding the load "events"[1] of these fonts, or Chrome mishandling data uri fonts in some way. We've filed https://crbug.com/607788 https://crbug.com/607788 to investigate further. Loading fonts well is hard. Here's some advice on doing it well: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/d511793a1c3b74b31460 https://gist.github.com/paulirish/d511793a1c3b74b31460 [0] You can explore the same recording here: https://frontend.chrome-dev.tools/serve_rev/@db7757b63f29696b9b465949f9704a0d9d149f2b/inspector.html?loadTimelineFromURL=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39519/fout-trace.json&experiments=true https://frontend.chrome-dev.tools/serve_rev/@db7757b63f29696... (Chrome only. Check the screenshots checkbox) [1] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-font-loading/ https://drafts.csswg.org/css-font-loading/ was standardized for these purposes. It's available in Chrome, Opera and Firefox to reliably detect when a font has finished loading. [‽] As mentioned later by hatsix, the font-display spec introduces a CSS property to provide control over FOUT/FOIT to the site: https://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-font-display/ https://tabatkins.github.io/specs/css-font-display/ It will definitely bring a lot of sanity to a something that's been a problem since at least 2009 :) http://www.paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/ http://www.paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/