My Ubuntu Blog

Finally, I found the solution to the Firefox Urdu Font related bug in Dapper. Me, the newbie, the linux illiterate who didn’t even know Tux; I solved a bug in an open source software that I am using on my open source operating system.

After upgrading to Dapper, I found that Firefox in Dapper does not render Urdu fonts properly. Since I spend a lot of time reading Urdu blogs and news sites, it was a major issue. It even forced me to install Konqueror, Galeon, Epiphany, Swiftfox, Firefox’s mozilla built. I spent many hours reading bug reports, comments on the bug reports, following different forum discussions and sharing my problem with users on all these platforms. I tried many solutions none of them worked out. On my way I found that several other people using different Linux distros were facing the same problem.

Then finally I found a discussion where some users were suggesting that Pango support should be disabled for Firefox. They suggested eachother to add MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 line in /etc/environment file. I tried this solution but it didn’t work. Then I tried MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0 and bingo!

Now I can read Urdu web pages and firefox renders these web pages perfectly displaying Urdu fonts beautifully even better than the Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows.

I am not sure about what was really wrong with Firefox but I guess that Ubuntu Dapper has pango support enabled for selective locales only. Firefox didn’t render Urdu fonts using Pango. I am not sure about this and would be grateful if someone confirms this to me.

The moral of story is that my Ubuntu Linux is very powerful and using it I can do whatever I want. You the windows user? Can you do this with your Windows?

Firefox is great but since I visit several websites that Firefox is unable to render properly I have no choice but to find an alternative. I am starting to hate Firefox and forcing myself to love Konqueror and Galeon but still whenever I am using Firefox I feel like using a familiar application. Like when I want to create bookmark folders or search the web I know how to do it in Firefox quickly. I am still unable to get full control on either Konqueror or Galeon.

Galeon renders pages just as good as Firefox. But I don’t like its simplistic approach. I can not customize it as much as I can do with Firefox and Konqueror. So the main competition is between Firefox and Konqueror.

There are many features in Firefox that I miss in Konqueror:

• Konqueror is not among the Gmail supported browsers. Many web applications such as writely, gmail and others (that I haven’t discovered yet) do not work with Konqueror. It has a ‘change browser identification’ feature which changes the browser identity to anything you want. Like mozilla, Internet explorer, etc. I tried this feature with Gmail, the default CSS view loaded but page didn’t appear as it does in Firefox. mail snippets were running over timestamps and it didn’t look pretty.
• In Firefox I place items on the file menu bar I can not do this in Konqueror.
• Ctrl+F opens a find utility in both browsers. Firefox opens it at the bottom above the status bar which I find more usable than Konqueror’s popup.

Features where Konqueror beats Firefox:

• I thught that Firefox has made it incredibly easy to search the web but Konqueror has amazed me with its built in search shortcuts. One can extend firefox by installing extensions and adding search engines but Konqueror is clearly way a head.
• Though I can not place items on the file menu but Konqueror makes it easy to hide the file menu and then display it again.
• Clicking on feed icon in the status bar adds the feed for the page to Akregator default KDE news aggregator. I find it more usable than firefox’s live bookmarks. What I don’t like in both browsers is that they do not show the feed URL in a way so that a user can copy the url and paste it somewhere else manually.

A web browser is perhaps the most crucial software that an end user wants. If I am going to use Konqueror then it would be better for me to use Kubuntu since it integrates well into KDE. But what about the cool web 2.0 applications? I don’t want to miss anything so I just want to stay on the safe side. I am quite confused in this situation.

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.

The only thing which is troubling me with Dapper is some bug with Firefox and Thunderbird. I check many Urdu websites each day, particularly blogs and BBC Urdu. There are two most popular Urdu fonts Nafees Web Naskh and Urdu Naskh Asiatype. Unfortunately Firefox, Thunderbird and Epiphany are unable to display these fonts. Instead pages are displayed first in sans-serif and after installing Tahoma, pages start appearing in Tahoma.

I tried my best to resolve this issue but nothing worked out. I filed a bug report and a support request (both unanswered till yet). If any one of you is facing this bug please add your comments on either my bug report or support request.

Konqueror and Galeon are two browsers that render web pages properly. Konqueror is just too advance for me. I liked Galeon which is simple and good. I still have to figure out some way to use alternate application for mail and news reader.

Did you know your Open Office has a Game hidden somewhere? Programmers call it Easter Eggs and I just found one from Planet Ubuntu. To activate this game, open a spread sheet in your open office, type the following formula in any cell and press enter:

=Game("StarWars")

A screen like this will popup:

Select your hero and enjoy.

I also found a secret quote hidden in all mozilla based browsers (firefox, galeon, mozilla, etc.) to read this message type about:mozilla in the address bar of any brower window or tab.

Tags:Easter Eggs, Open Office, mozilla

I am now a regular visitor to Ubuntu forums. I find it very exciting to learn the great things I can do with my free Operating system. Few days ago I came across this poll.

What do Ubuntu users feel should be the default web browser in Dapper?

• Epiphany
• Firefox
• Opera

Before switching to Ubuntu/Linux I was already using Firefox on Windows XP. So it was nice to see the same thing in Ubuntu and it never occured to me that I should consider using other browsers like Epiphany, Galeon, etc. Opera was out of question as I used it with Windows and didn’t like it.

After installing Epiphany and Galeon, I launched Epiphany first. Since I had already read the forums so I had a little idea of Epiphany in my mind, but it surprised me. It looks like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, just a little more cute and simple than Internet Explorer. It has cute large icons, a very simple interface and it is easy on eyes. This was my first impression of Epiphany. I typed in a random URI and it loads pages quickly.

It has an Up button which takes you to parent folder of the web directory you are currently viewing. For example if you are viewing http://www.example.com/2006/04/page.html the Up button can take you to :

http://www.example.com/2006/04/
http://www.example.com/2006/
http://www.example.com/

I liked this feature but it doesn’t show up by default you will have to add it from Edit > Toolbar or you can use it from Go menu. Epiphany doesn’t show the little orange icon in the status bar to indicate that the page displayed has RSS feed(s) to offer. Firefox has this little utility which saves time when you want to bookmark an RSS feed. Epiphany also has some problem displaying Urdu unicode text which firefox displays perfectly but Epiphany displays these pages in default fonts not the fonts specified in stylesheets. I know there must be some help available to solve this issue but since my daily browsing includes many pages written in Urdu unicode text so Epiphany is not useful out of the box for me.

Apart from discussion on Ubuntu Forums I found this article from Newsforge it was published some two years back. Epiphany is still not getting approval from Gnome Desktop users.

Tags: ubuntu, firefox, epiphany, gnome, linux