I am trying to create SVG text that looks as similar as possible across different browsers.
I know in theory that neither Firefox nor IE 9 support SVG fonts. However, I am confused as to why they both seem to be able to pick up my fonts downloaded from Typekit.
If you look at this example, http://www.concord.org/~sfentress/test-svg2.html, you'll see two examples that are trying to use the "Museo" font.
The first one just specifies "font-family="'museo-slab'", a font downloaded from Typekit. The second one links directly to an svg font file, museo-sans-500, on the server.
On Chrome both fonts are rendered correctly, but on both Firefox and IE only the first one does. This seems very strange to me -- I would have expected either both to work or neither to work.
How are Firefox and IE able to render the first font correctly but not the second?
Neither Firefox nor Internet explorer support SVG fonts, (as you said). Your first font is not a font made of SVG glyphs, so it renders properly. I see that support for SVG fonts in these browsers may be in the works soon, but until then, they will not render fonts defined by SVG glyphs.