You make valid points, but some don't convince me:
1. For non-animated icons with few shapes it doesn't matter. SVG performance has come a long way — I've used SVG charts with 3000 nodes and it worked smoothly zoomed in on the 2048px iPad.
Also, rendering of individual font glyphs is not necessarily faster. Hinted subpixel rendering costs, and text rendering engines rely on speed savings from caching prepredered glyphs.
3. Possible, but admittedly ugly with `url(data:text/svg,…)` in CSS.
4. I bet those icon fonts don't have hinting either, and autohinting designed for letters may deform icons.
5. You can reference external SVG files or put SVG in CSS.
7. SVG is styleable with CSS (although CSS internal to the file), so you have even more options for styling icons (e.g. you can have separate colors for fill and stroke or even each part of the icon).
1. For non-animated icons with few shapes it doesn't matter. SVG performance has come a long way — I've used SVG charts with 3000 nodes and it worked smoothly zoomed in on the 2048px iPad.
Also, rendering of individual font glyphs is not necessarily faster. Hinted subpixel rendering costs, and text rendering engines rely on speed savings from caching prepredered glyphs.
3. Possible, but admittedly ugly with `url(data:text/svg,…)` in CSS.
4. I bet those icon fonts don't have hinting either, and autohinting designed for letters may deform icons.
5. You can reference external SVG files or put SVG in CSS.
7. SVG is styleable with CSS (although CSS internal to the file), so you have even more options for styling icons (e.g. you can have separate colors for fill and stroke or even each part of the icon).