Do IE browsers (IE6, 7, 8) support @font-face?

Question

According to this article, http://www.standardista.com/css3/font-face-browser-support IE supports @font-face but I couldn't find any site which has valid custom font face working for IE

Also, if IE supports custom font via @font-face from early on (IE6), then why people still using cufon for instance?

Any clarifications or examples?

Answer 1

Older version of Internet Explorer supports Embedded OpenType (EOT) files before @font-face was formalized in CSS3. You can find compatible files on sites like FontSquirrel or Google's Font API. FontSquirrel's conversion tool should also help here. Also worth a read would be the latest bulletproof syntax recommended by fontspring to embedding multiple files for multiple browsers.

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The fact that this wasn't used frequently until recently is two-folds; first there are legal issues with using @font-face fonts - copyrights to be specific. Unlike cufon which only retains the shape of the fonts, with @font-face you are transmitting the actual fonts themselves, which has legal implications.

The other problem is support in other browsers - Firefox 3 was the last of the modern browsers to not support @font-face in some way, so before Firefox 3.5's release in mid-2009 @font-face was still not viable. In addition to all that there are differences in format support between the browsers, so the development of the technology is slow.