Now that Mozilla has finally fixed Firefox’s ligature glitch (present since version 1) after four years, I have a good reason to switch.
   The problem has been around since Netscape finished its 4·7 browser, which was the original reason I switched to Internet Explorer 5. It was quite odd: IE had not been very good typographically up to that point, and I stuck with the Netscape series between version 1·1 and 4·7. It seemed Microsoft picked up the baton as far as good type was concerned, and I went over.
   As IE grew clunkier, I discovered Maxthon, a Chinese-developed browser that had the engine of IE, but a sleeker, more compact front end. It proved far more reliable than IE, and I also felt some kinship that I was supporting Chinese behind the Bamboo Curtain. (The program was developed, in part, to stop Communist authorities tracing what it might deem as counter-revolutionary browsing back to citizens.)
   Maxthon also gives me the choice of using the IE kernel or the Gecko one in Firefox, which is clever.
   I haven’t tried that and I still support the Maxthon ethos, but I am switching over to Firefox on a trial basis to see how it goes.
   One big reason was the repair of the glitch—where Firefox could not display ligatures or even quotation marks in the same typeface as the rest of the text.
   The second reason was Digg. Digg seems to be very slow, for some reason, on the IE kernel. On Firefox, it is normal.
   There are pages that claim that Firefox has automatic ligature support for certain fonts as well as kerning. I look forward to seeing how true those claims are or even how well they work (Ralf Herrmann indicates they’re still buggy). Up till now we have been programming in basic kerning via stylesheets at the Lucire site.
   I may go back to Maxthon and run it with Gecko but I generally loathe changing program settings too much. It gives the boffins a chance to wriggle out of their responsibilities of delivering good programs by blaming things on user modifications.
   I have made one concession to IE, however: I have installed a plug-in which gives me that reassuring sound each time I click on a link. I know a lot of people hate it and I was initially taken aback when I switched to IE5, but after so many years I have become accustomed to it.
   I’ll likely stick to this browser for a while, at least until they mess up the typography. Posted by Jack Yan, 23:08  permalink

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