I have no idea. We've been suggesting that for years as well. But the web fonts team seems to have no interest in mitigating the Google Chrome Windows bug.

"ChromeOS" Chromebooks look so much nicer than Windows... if you want to browse the web like it's supposed to work, get a Chromebook. /sarcasm

Seriously, this has bugged me for a very long time myself. I don't get why it hasn't been fixed, it's been an issue as long as I can remember, and fortunately, other than at work or my desktop at home, I'm not on windows... My HTPC, which I use for reading more than anything is on Ubuntu, and I recently got a Chromebook as an interim replacement for my stolen MBP.

Though some of the comments mention (rightly) that SVG fonts are larger files than WOFF... they don't seem to take into consideration that SVG, being text/xml can be greatly compressed in transit. I also, REALLY don't get why Google's web fonts' css doesn't give the SVG first to chrome+windows users, so things at least look better there until they fix chrome.

It doesn't bug me much other than having to self-host font files and ensure they're in the hacky order to fix Chrome's issue. Then again, I don't use Chrome other than for testing web pages. I run Firefox on Windows and Android and sync them. When Firefox first started using DirectDraw, there were some issues with fonts, but Mozilla made it a priority and got it sorted relatively quickly (lightning fast compared to Chrome's font bugs).

Couldn't they also only serve up the fix to affected chrome browsers by checking the user agent string in the request header? That way they give the most effective format based on the browser and os requesting it.

That's what I meant. The Google Fonts CSS is already based on the user agent string (it doesn't contain media-queries or similar tricks), so they just need to treat Chrome+Win differently and tell it to load the SVG version.