With the recent 4.2 update for the iPad and iPhone Apple quietly added a number of new features to mobile Safari.  Mobile Safari now has direct support for the accelerometer, gyroscope, HTML5 web sockets, updated HTML5 form support, new Javascript data types, updated DOM events, and enhanced SVG and Canvas support.

Also it appears that mobile Safari now has far better support for @font-face switching from preferring SVG fonts to TTF fonts.  This one change now opens up the door to using Google Fonts on the iPad without crashing the browser.  With some initial testing it looks like I’ll be able to update the Inspire Well theme to re-enable the use of Google Fonts on the iPad.

From the comments:

@font-face has worked for a long time on iOS given some specific caveats. However, the new news on web fonts in 4.2 is that iOS now prefers the TTF version of a font over the SVG version (formerly SVG was the only format supported.)

The other nice thing about web fonts on 4.2 is that they now work in offline webapps. This was a big deal for me and I only discovered it by luck. Still; this will be a pretty handy feature for a lot of folks I think.

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• style hatch