[digg=http://digg.com/software/A_Firefox_bug_prevailing_more_than_2_5_years]Today I noticed something fishy in the Google Reader while reading the Chennai MetBlog Post of Iniya Pongal Nalvalthukkal. I was viewing the post through Google Reader using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11( Downloaded yesterday Jan-14-2008).

The fishy thing is Tamil Indic text rendered by Firefox was garbled. I checked quickly with other Indic language scripts( Hindi, Telugu, Kannada ). They seems to render properly.

The post which I was reading in Firefox , which renders Tamil Indic text.

Same through the Microsoft Internet Explorer. I could see correct text rendered.

I checked with one of the Wikipedia article which runs test for rendering the Unicode Indic scripts.

The 2nd Column shows the correct rendering, 3rd column displays the Wrong Indic rendering in the current browser ( Firefox )

The 2nd Column shows the correct rendering, 3rd column displays the Correct Indic rendering in the current browser ( Internet Explorer )

Then I verified the rendering of Tamil Wikipedia in both the Browsers.

Tamil Wikipedia rendered in Internet Explorer

IE rocks in rendering the Tamil Unicode pages properly.

I checked in the BlogoSphere to find any such blogs have already complained about this problem and found I found Vasanth Dharmaraj’s blog. Surprising things is, he complained the problem on Aug, 2005.

Also I checked with another site which has the details of the bug and the fix. The site says that the fix will be shipped in 2007. Also, it lists some trackbacks of the bug.

Immediately I did a search in Bugzilla. The bug has been reported more than twice to the developers.

• Bug 292429 – Tamil Unicode is not displayed properly
• Bug 391805 – Firefox 2.0.0.6 does not display proper Tamil,Telugu letters(Unicode)
• Bug 333659 – Move nsTextFrame over to Thebes APIs

It’s about 2.5+ years and still the problem is in Firefox. I’m really surprised why Firefox developers hasn’t fixed it until.