> We consider a small subset of our icons to be critical to the user's experience but we don’t think that way about our font or the other icons.
Why don't you consider your font to be critical? In my experience, with Safari, if you use a custom font, text won't render at all until the font has loaded.
We consider the system font critical, and we render the page with that because it it will load instantly. The custom font is then loaded after the content and used on the following page.
Note: this setup is only used sparingly on our site as it has been waiting for this piece of work to be completed.
Curious, the first time I read your post, I saw exactly what I described, which is all text was missing for a second, and then appeared in the custom font.
But when I try now, I get the system font for a second, then it switches over to the custom font.
Why don't you consider your font to be critical? In my experience, with Safari, if you use a custom font, text won't render at all until the font has loaded.