[aidos]

That didn't sound right to me, and I've just checked that the fonts are loading for me. I wonder if you were embedding them in a way that didn't work?

EDIT: here's how I'm doing the embedding

    <style type="text/css">
        @font-face { font-family:FontName; src:url(data:font/otf;base64,T1RUTwAOAIAAAwBgQ0ZGIHKc...AAAAAAAAAAAA=) format("opentype"); }
    </style>

I've passed by the Chrome SVG code a bit, and I've never seen anything to suggest there's an "SVG lite" type version in there. I imagine it's just painted to a bitmap and handed to the compositor like everything else (obviously a massive simplification).

[eyelidlessness]

I think you can safely embed data URLs because they’re known to be static. What you can’t generally do is trigger a network waterfall or dynamic evaluation from an img tag’s SVG resource.

[aidos]

Gotcha. When thinking of embedded fonts, my mind goes straight to totally embedded with data-uris (which would have worked around OPs issue above).