Firefox 3.5 now supports using arbitrary fonts installed on the users system or download fonts via an url using @font-face CSS rules — we've only been waiting some fifteen years for this but better late than never.

One practical issue is performance: font files can be quite large. Picking a random one in my font directory shows 238kb. Compressing this with LZMA reduces size to 133kb but (afaik) LZMA compression isn't supported or planned.

Even if it was supported, my website logo rendered as an image takes less than 3kb and so there's a significant penalty for using fonts (at least on my slow wireless connection).

This can of course be mitigated by using locally installed fonts where possible and caching (not sure if this is supported yet).

I'm sure we'll start hearing various commercial concerns squeal about piracy, but I suspect that vast majority of people will use fonts that are available for free. Game on.