Unlike Firefox or Chrome on Linux, Chrome on Windows does not try all the fonts before giving up and using 'tofu' (empty square).  Instead, Chrome just tries fonts specified in the font-stack in CSS, a fixed list of fonts (per user-pref, hard-coded, etc) and stop. 

We've been bitten by this behavior multiple times. For instance, I suspect that we'd not have suffered as much (Firefox is not affected) from a seemingly mysterious font breakage on Windows 10 ( see  bug 593253  comment 29 and http://windowsreport.com/font-bugs-windows-10 ) if Blink on Windows is like Firefox or Blink on Linux. 

There are other cases where this is desirable. A user installed a font for a script/language Chrome did not have 'hardcoded' script->font mapping entry. Chrome shows tofus for characters in that script. Firefox is perfectly fine. 

I'm pretty sure that there's a bug on this issue, but I couldn't find it any more. So, I'm filing a new bug.