Typekit really need to improve the way they do their user-agent detection. At the moment, it seems that if the user-agent-string doesn’t contain either ‘Firefox’ or ‘Safari’, then Typekit won’t work, even when the rendering engine is capable of rendering the fonts.

This isn’t an issue for many. But it is if you’re using a development build of a browser, or you’re using a Linux distribution with a modified version of Firefox that, due to licensing restrictions, can’t use the Firefox branding. In this case, the user-agent string will contain the development name of the browser, such as ‘Shiretoko’ or ‘Namoroka’.

In Firefox, changing the user-agent string in about:config to ‘Firefox’ will solve this problem. In Chromium (the development build of Google Chrome), you’ll need to launch the browser with a command something like this:

chromium-browser --user-agent="Firefox/3.5.5" --enable-remote-fonts

Recent builds of Chromium now support @font-face, so you might not need the -enable-remote-fonts option.

Hopefully, Typekit will improve their browser detection by checking the rendering engine in the user-agent string, rather than simply the browser name.

Gnome Shell will be the new window manager in Gnome 3, but it can be used in the current version of Gnome by installing the gnome-shell package, and running ‘gnome-shell –replace’ in a terminal.

To have Gnome Shell as the default window manager, setting the WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable won’t work in Gnome 2.28. Instead you need to install ‘gconf-editor’ using your package manager, then go to:

/desktop/gnome/session/required_components

and set the ‘windowmanager’ key to ‘gnome-shell’ instead of ‘metacity’.