I am using @font-face and my page is being blocked from downloading when my @font-face service provider goes down. ( All requests significantly slow down to a crawl ONLY at the point that the font-face provider's .css file is being requested and this does not occur when the service provider's .css loads smoothly )
Everything I have read suggests that this should ONLY happen in IE and only when there is a tag above the css call. However, I am encountering this problem on Webkit browsers and I am being sure to call the css file prior to any script tags.
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Do you know what could be causing it or how to alleviate it?
For anybody running into this. The answer boils down to how CSS is parsed and loaded by browsers. Browsers will wait for all css to be loaded before rendering a page. Since the css/font host's servers were slow, it was blocking my page from rendering.
My solution was to host the fonts through a cdn service that was much more reliable than the font hosting company.