Bram Stein on leveraging the W3C Preload spec for font performance:
To solve this we need preload hints for web fonts. If we can tell the browser that we definitely need a font, it can start downloading it much earlier. This will significantly improve perceived and actual performance. Fonts that are downloaded earlier will render sooner and decrease the impact of blocking rendering (or the snap that happens when fallback fonts are replaced by web fonts).
Fonts are an on going issue for web site performance. I’m still wondering if Google ( Alphabet? ) is going to do a study on the most used fonts and start shipping them with Chrome. Perhaps a font extension pack?