Fire­fox 3.5 was released ear­li­er today, and joins Safari in sup­port­ing the @font-face rule with Open­Type and True­Type font fam­i­lies, allow­ing you to use a wider range of fonts in your designs (as long as they are cor­rect­ly licensed, of course).

One slight draw­back of the tech­nique is the blank space that’s dis­played as the new font is loaded into the brows­er; this is espe­cial­ly unnec­es­sary for users who already have that font native­ly on their system.

The way to get around that is quite sim­ple; use local() to check if the font is on the user’s sys­tem first.

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To much fan­fare (the blow­ing of their own trum­pets), Opera today announced Unite, a new ser­vice which lets you use the brows­er as a per­son­al file serv­er and social space. I haven’t had more than a pass­ing glance at it yet — my URL is home.stopsatgreen.operaunite.com, if you’d like to see if I’m avail­able — but it cer­tain­ly looks inter­est­ing. Use­ful? I’m not sure yet.

• An intro­duc­tion to Opera Unite (Dev.Opera)
• With Unite, Opera 10 becomes both a brows­er and a con­tent serv­er (Down­load Squad)
• Host Your Own Face­book With Opera Unite (Web­mon­key)
• Opera Unite Seeks to Decen­tral­ize the Web (Site­Point)