Font Awesome is awesome, except that it doesn’t work with Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome out of the box (see what I did there?). So if you’re seeing little squares instead of the icons you’re expecting, here’s the solution.
Open the .htaccess file for your site and add the following code:
<FilesMatch ".(ttf|otf|eot|woff)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>
This is a great snippet that I found here.
If you don’t already have an .htaccess file, create one in the root directory of your site. It is a plain text file and must be called exactly “.htaccess” (no that’s not just the file extension). I’m using WordPress so this is what my .htaccess file looks like now:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
<FilesMatch ".(ttf|otf|eot|woff)$">
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</IfModule>
</FilesMatch>
# END WordPress
Refresh your browser and your icons should now appear.
If this doesn’t work, make sure you don’t have another copy of font awesome installed. This could happen, for example, if you are using WordPress and you installed a fontawesome plugin, or if you tried uploading a newer version in some previous frustrated attempt to fix this.