Get it All
Together

Amid all the tragedy of the Japanese tsunami situation, we got a chance to inject a bit of normalcy into our day and go to the mall. While there, I had a chance to check out a Motorola Xoom at the Verizon store. Of course as any good developer would, I immediately began running through a battery of my own websites and projects to see how they compared on the native browser.

The result was somewhat shockingly disappointing: not only did Xoom’s browser appear not to want to render the web font packages I had installed on one of my sites, but in fact did not degrade properly either. The font packages are Font Squirrel packages and work decently with every other browser I’ve encountered. But on the Xoom, serifed fonts which had the base “serif” as their last choice of fonts in the family ended up rendering in a sans-serif text.

Is that because the browser is choking on the web font and just giving up? Is that because there is no default serifed font (how is that even possible?)? I do not know and only got a few moments of playing before the inevitable cheery sales person investigated my interest and harshed my groove. So I didn’t get a chance to find out. But boy, would I like to!