Hopefully, fonts will at least look good in IE9, even if IE7 and IE8 continue to look sloppy.
I have no clue where Firefox is, as far as font-rendering is concerned.
It would be interesting, though, to see where things are different between installed fonts and embedded files.

(PS. Oh! I notice you got rid of the hot fire question! Have you noticed changes in spam rates?)

As a designer of websites, I’m looking forward to this. As a user of websites, I am a little fearful. Poorly designed websites that thwart usability will now have the added option of ill-advised typeface choices.

Agree with you. But that has been true of every advance on the web, from font size to JavaScript. 9px Arial. Pages that fail if you’re not using the “right” browser, don’t have scripting turned on, can’t use a mouse, etc.

With every advance, some bad sites get worse, but the medium crawls forward.

(I kind of think this is the story of human history.)

I am also curious about the aggregate effect on the average web experience. Do users currently benefit from a limited number of options, specifically when it comes to body copy, when moving from site to site? Will widespread use of embedding fonts change this?

Please don’t repeat foundries’/microsoft’s false dychtomy.

I’m repeating Microsoft’s rationale for creating the Embedded Open Type format, not stating an opinion about piracy and whether EOT or any format can prevent a dedicated thief from stealing fonts.

You haven’t ever tried to pirate fonts, have you?

Funny story.

I stole fonts through not knowing any better when I first started using a Macintosh to do art direction.

Here’s how uninformed I was. I not only didn’t know what I was doing was stealing, I also didn’t know how to do it. I took home bitmaps on a floppy drive, not realizing they were useless without the Postscript file. When I brought them home, I wondered why they were jaggy—and I kind of dug the jaggy look. It felt “computery.” Years later I would deliberate incorporate jagginess into my earliest website designs, to communicate “internetiness,” “computerness,” etc.

Of course we were all having fun visually with jaggies and visible pixels and extremely limited color palettes back at the start of web design. Calling attention to the medium was just the postmodern thing to do.

I suppose if we had been around at the beginning of cinema, we would have made sure the sprocket holes showed up onscreen.

But I digress.

Windows and real type on the web. That is the question.

Please don’t repeat foundries’/microsoft’s false dychtomy.

Pirates will simply continue to use TTF, and convert TTF to EOT when needed. Non-official tool is much easier to use than Microsoft-sanctioned one.

And nobody cares about downloading individual fonts off the sites when you can get 10,000 font DVD torrent.

You haven’t ever tried to pirate fonts, have you? :)

As a designer, I’m excited about the possibility of rich Web typography. On the other hand, as a Windows user (who prefers to browse and develop in something other than Safari), every time I go to a website with body copy set in anything other than the Core Fonts for the Web or the new ClearType Collection, I want to stab myself in the eye with a fork.

I do wish Microsoft or browser-makers would improve rendering of the more adventurous fonts, but until that becomes widespread, I implore designers to stop using other fonts for body copy! (Display type is generally okay.)

An all Websites we use sIFR and I think its the best solution (for Headlines), cause the fallback to normal CSS styling is a good one.

How is font rendering in the new MS OS? I have not looked? Are they still jag?

We are currently experiencing that issue while testing a new website for client.