Few days ago, I talked about a bug in Firefox (1.5.0.3 ubuntu dapper) related to the display of Urdu Fonts. On Oreilly Linux Devcenter, Caitlyn Martin discusses problems with Firefox for Linux. In the article titled “Why Is Firefox For Linux So Terribly Broken?” she writes:
I’m currently running Firefox 1.5.0.4 on three Linux distributions: Vector Linux 5.1, Fedora Core 5, and Xubuntu Dapper 6.06. On all three the browser crashes frequently on all sorts of web sites seemingly at random. I’ve had it happen on a diverse variety of sites, generally fairly complex ones, ranging from eBay to the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahranot. There is one website, one I use all the time, that will always cause Firefox to crash: Yahoo! Mail. Any attempt to read mail on the Yahoo! website generates a crash.
While adding comments to this article several people has reported similar issues with Firefox. Many users reported that Firefox has problems displaying Bidi, Hebrew and Arabic fonts and keyboards. Some users also confirmed that Firefox runs slower on Linux than on Windows. While replying to comments Caitlyn Martin writes:
First off, this isn’t a font problem. No other application is impacted. This isn’t a distribution specific problem as it happens on three different distributions. “It works for me” is a thoroughly unhelpful answer as I can generate as many crashes as you like. Firefox being useless to me at the time I wrote this was not “rhetoric”. If I can’t even check my mail without an almost immediate crash that is truly unusuable, is it not? Now that we’ve eliminated 90% of the comments lets go back to the 10% that are actually useful.
I think that Firefox must listen to these complaints and make firefox work as reliable and fast on Linux as it works on Windows. Seeing this article and other people talking about our Urdu font display issue I am hopeful that this problem will soon get resolved.
