Ralf Herrmann’s typography blog has a great post up comparing the type handling of Safari 3, which doesn’t support kerning or OpenType layout features, with Firefox 3, which does in theory. Unfortunately, it’s still got a way to go: for example, ligatures are applied universally that should only appear under certain contextual conditions. Hopefully this will continue to be tweaked for the point releases.
Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3 [Ralf Herrmann via TUAW]
Reading the comments you’ll find it all works perfectly, contextual ligatures included, in FF3 on XP. It’s FF3 on OSX that’s the problem. And someone apparently in the know appears to point the finger at OSX’s type engine.
@JOEFRU: Safari 3.1 supports @font-face, so in Safari, you’d see the right font if the developer specified it.
That’s all well and good, but I don’t have any of those fonts, so all I would see is Times New Roman anyway.
@DNL2BA: Except that the licenses on most typefaces do not allow for distribution, preventing embedding.
That’s really something alright.