Hosting Web Fonts on Amazon S3 (IE CSS3117 and Firefox bad URI or cross-site access not allowed errors)

If you’ve ever tried to host web fonts on a different domain you’ve probably run into the following errors in IE and Firefox:

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Usually this is a simple matter of updating your server with the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header. Unfortunately if you’re hosting your assets on Amazon S3 or CloudFront, editing the server config to add this isn’t possible.

This problem was originally posted to the AWS forums back in 2009… and a mere 3+ years later they finally released a fix.

Simply go to the Properties pane in the S3 Management Console and edit the CORS configuration. Here’s an example configuration:

You can find more information about configuring CORS here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html#how-do-i-enable-cors