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13.2.06

Why I don’t use Firefox 

I’ve had a full-on day away from The Persuader Blog (which is actually quite healthy sometimes—as I could probably spend all day here), and will have a few posts coming up. But one thing struck me today: and how, after so many iterations, it still cannot support some common characters.
   This is a problem for a . Specifically, Firefox and 6 and 7 do not support and double quote marks properly. Before you send me a lot of emails about this, let me share this: I run a system, and friends have sent me screen shots from their so I know they are OK. I also run . But regardless of whether I use Type 1, or , ligatures and double quote marks always show up in another font in Firefox.
   Here’s how this page shows up in Firefox (ligatures highlighted—note the different heights and weights; the quote marks are too small to be noticeably different at this reduced size):



   I have sent for Firefox and Netscape, to no avail. But I experience these things on three different Windows of three different vintages with three different settings—so I refuse to believe I am alone.
   It’s been my life: to buy bits and pieces and find that my situation is not in an , or that personnel have never come across it before.
   Except I’m beginning to doubt that I am unique in that way. And I am sure that when things go belly-up with your computer, tech support or makes you feel like you are the only person in the world who has had that problem, no matter how polite the rep is. The only exception I can recall off-hand are the people at Rackspace, who always go out of their way to help, and never make me feel I have a problem they have not seen before.
   I’ve had to reinstall many times; I still can’t access LinkedIn using ; and for years I told that it was the wind that was causing my to the disbelief of the support staff (I was eventually proven right, but it took over two years). Last year, between three people and two support people in two countries (well, Australia never answered, so you had better make that one support person in one country), it took us 90 minutes to figure out how to burn a data CD on Mac OS X because the CD-ROM icon did not show up as it was meant to, and as it was described in every single manual and book we had.
   I’m not asking an awful lot of the manufacturers—just use the same set of standards. I don’t want to open Firefox for LinkedIn, and Maxthon or IE for the other sites: that is ridiculous. I don’t care about the politics behind and : I am a regular Joe who wants the products simply to work. In your manuals, write in English—not . And keep forums so we can go and solve our own problems and not bug you. Track the conversations there so you can answer my questions when I call—too often I have come to you and you are clueless, but I eventually find it answered, after having different keywords, by a regular person on a forum who fluked his or her solution. When I am on these forums, don’t have your staff insult me for trying to help other customers when you fail to.
   I believe solve problems, so I will be interested to hear if anyone out there has ever come across my Firefox problem. There is still nothing on Google, and this problem has been around since Netscape 6. Surf over to the post where the above screen shot was taken here and see if you have the problem: it’ll make me feel better.
   The reality that I have come to realize is that the public seems to be able to help me more than any department can usually, even when I have paid for it. At the very least I won’t feel alone.

Del.icio.us tags: Firefox | Mozilla | browsers | technical support | customer service | typography
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Comments:
Update: upgraded to 1·5 and still no resolution.  
Still no joy in v. 2·0.F  
The weight looks consistent at a wide range of sizes for me. I'm using Firefox 2 on Win 2000 and tried it with Decennie JY and Verdana.

The problem could be that you're not using an HTML escape character. I think you still need to use them in UTF-8, but I'm not 100% sure. The blogging software is supposed to do this kinda stuff, of course, but even on-the-ball people like Blogger.com are still a bit behind in this area.

Don't forget, even if you don't use Firefox, many other people do, and might see the problem :)  
Justin, I want to belatedly thank you for your comment, which I must have missed in 2007. Firefox 3 has solved these issues, which is good; and thank you for being a customer of ours!  
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Note

Entries from 2006 to the end of 2009 were done on the Blogger service. As of January 1, 2010, this blog has shifted to a Wordpress installation, with the latest posts here.
   With Blogger ceasing to support FTP publishing on May 1, I have decided to turn these older pages in to an archive, so you will no longer be able to enter comments. However, you can comment on entries posted after January 1, 2010.


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