google chrome - Why don't websites immediately display their text these days? - Super User

One reason is that web designers nowadays like to use web fonts (usually in WOFF format), e.g. through Google Web fonts.

Previously, the only fonts that was able to be displayed on a site was those that the user had locally installed. Since e.g. Mac and Windows users not necessarily had the same fonts, designers instinctively always defined rules as

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

where, if the first font wasn't found on the system, the browser would look for the second, and lastly a fallback "sans-serif" font.

Now, one can give a font URL as a CSS rule to get the browser to download a font, as such:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Serif:400,700);

and then load the font for a specific element by e.g.:

font-family: 'Droid Serif',sans-serif;

This is very popular to be able to use custom fonts, but it also leads to the problem that no text is displayed until the resource has been loaded by the brower, which includes the download time, the font loading time and the render time. I expect that this is the artifact that you are experiencing.

As an example: one of my national newspapers, Dagens Nyheter, use web fonts for their headlines, but not their leads, so when that site is loaded I usually see the leads first, and half a second later all the blank spaces above are populated with headlines (this is true on Chrome and Opera, at least. Haven't tried others).

(Also, designers sprinkle JavaScript absolutely everywhere these days, so maybe someone is trying to do something clever with the text, which is why it is delayed. That would be very site specific, though: the general tendency for text to be delayed in these times is the web fonts issue described above, I believe.)