Firefox 3.6 Released, First Web FontFont Is Free

Yesterday, Mozilla launched Firefox 3.6, which — among more frivolous features — supports WOFF (Web Open Font Format), the downloadable webfont format supported by most major font vendors. This is a big step for online typography. With a growing market share, Firefox will bring webfonts to a significant chunk of users, and it seems likely that WebKit (Safari) and Chrome will follow suit.

In step with the Firefox release, FSI FontShop International followed through on their promise to provide FontFonts for the web by offering their first publicly available WOFF font for free. FF Nuvo Medium WOFF Demo is a fully functional webfont, usable via the @font-face CSS property without DRM or domain restrictions. It should give web designers a sense of how easy it is to use WOFF fonts, and a picture of what's to come when Web FontFonts are officially released.

Here's what FF Nuvo Medium WOFF Demo looks like:

And here's FF Nuvo Medium WOFF Demo as HTML text using @font-face. If you're viewing this page with Firefox 3.6 you'll see FF Nuvo — selectable, resizable, indexable text that is easy for the page authors to modify. Other browsers will deliver the fallback font, Georgia, instead.

FF Nuvo using @font-face

More evidence of Web FontFonts at work can be seen immediately after you download Firefox 3.6. The browser's welcome page is set almost entirely in a web version of Mozilla's identity typeface, FF Meta. It's the perfect demonstration of how downloadable, HTML-friendly fonts will bring comprehensive branding to the web. Setting type in the non-system font once required a static image or Flash-based hacks, but it can now be accomplished by rendering the actual OpenType font. FF Meta Web will be available soon in WOFF format. It's available now via Typekit.

Firefox 3.6's welcome page uses FF Meta Web in WOFF format for nearly all its text.