Hello Gerard M., On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:52:03 +0100, you wrote:
Just saying that Firefox is better is plain stupid when the argument IS that it does underperform. [...] So I am fully aware why there is a such a strong case for IE and against Firefox when used with Farsi and propably Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew.
I agree, and I can confirm your suspicions regarding Hebrew. I have tested recent versions of Firefox and Mozilla with Hebrew, and neither of them can handle complex Hebrew text with combined diacritics and cantillation marks. I believe it is a case of varying degrees of support for glyph-substituting in complex combinations. Opera is best on this, with IE as a good #2. A problem with Opera in Windows seems to be that it corrupts pictures when downloading them from Wikipedia. Therefore, I personally use Opera for most things, and IE when needing to download Wikipedia images.
(Another problem with Opera is that it is in some ways less up to it when it comes to CSS than IE is. In that respect, Mozilla and Firefox does a bit better than Opera, but they are both actually outperformed by IE when it comes to scrollbar properties, block-align by css in table cells, etc.)
That does not by any means mean that I am particularly fond of IE...! It is just that it is one of the two Windows browsers I know of that can actually handle Hebrew properly. Not because I am stupid or uninformed, but because I need something that Firefox and Mozilla (and sometimes also Opera) do not in fact provide.
-Olve
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Olve Utne http://utne.nvg.org