Arch Linux

Bogart

Member

From: Madrid, Spain

Registered: 2005-06-22

Posts: 262

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

The most important aspect for me is READABILITY. The official Firefox cairo does not have the LCD Patches. So, it's worthless for me. That's why you have to build it from source if you want to have decent fonts.

Exactly. Then you surely understand why I really prefer the official build that does not have the ligatures bug, which makes BonEcho unusable for me.

Again, more choices, more people happy

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,880

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

I don't get the fuss

No kidding.

Again, more choices, more people happy

Indeed.

Why all of the criticism? Bogart saw a need and provided a solution. It's a choice that leads to more choice. Is there a problem here?

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Choice.....

....over-rated

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

YscO

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2006-06-25

Posts: 52

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Hmmm, it is indeed more responsive in my humble opinion. Thanks for the effort, I'm using it now

ozar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2005-02-18

Posts: 1,680

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Bon Echo has been causing a number of problems on my machine for many months now, the worst of which was vertical scrolling and pages not loading issues, but installing the official Firefox package made them vanish.

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oz

attila

Member

Registered: 2006-11-14

Posts: 293

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

@Bogart Thanks for your work and for the perfect template to do it with seamonkey in the same way.

Just for the stats (and the devs): It works for me in the same way as the package from extra and from my view it would be a good idea to put in community. If you think this to the end for i686 than having this one could save time for doing the versions which be not on mozilla.org. But perhaps i'm not the right to discuss it because i have no problem with non-gpl images -) and i I don't want to start a new discussion about BonEcho.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Bugs in our firefox/bon echo? http://bugs.archlinux.org -- tell us so they can be fixed!

berbae

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 885

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

The bug concerning the ligature problem, after the removal of the firefox-2.0-pango-ligatures patch, is already there : FS#6087 (reopened), but nobody seems to look at it, maybe because it has a Low severity.
Can somebody give it a higher severity please ? Because it seems more serious than low.

Last edited by berbae (2008-02-27 08:55:01)

eerok

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2005-03-20

Posts: 171

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

The ligature problem seems unique to DejaVu Sans, and doesn't appear when using Bitstream Vera Sans or Verdana.  I think it's too much to ask a package maintainer to attempt to debug Firefox's font handling system when (1) it's unclear if the bug is in Bon Echo or in the DejaVu fonts, and (2) you can solve the problem by changing fonts.

Sometimes you have to roll with the punches and accept the little imperfections you find in software and in life.  I just don't think it's practical to fuss over this.

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noobus in perpetuus

Bestiapeluda

Member

From: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Registered: 2007-10-16

Posts: 179

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

But Bogart explained that the original Firefox doesn't have that problem with the DejaVu fonts.

eerok

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2005-03-20

Posts: 171

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

But Bogart explained that the original Firefox doesn't have that problem with the DejaVu fonts.

Sure, but what exactly is the ligature problem with DejaVu fonts in Bon Echo a side effect of?  It's not as if there's a checkbox for "screw up DejaVu fonts" ... it's a side effect.  It could be something simple, or maybe every tiny difference between the official Firefox and Bon Echo would have to be tested even to find the problem.

On the other hand, you could use another font, which is all I'm saying.  I didn't even know about this problem until I read this thread.

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noobus in perpetuus

stojic

Member

From: Zagreb, Croatia

Registered: 2008-02-24

Posts: 51

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Wow, this is definitely much faster than BonEcho when it comes to font rendering (and, subsequently, scrolling). When changing font in BonEcho it takes several seconds to redisplay the page with a new font, while Firefox takes less than half second. On some pages scrolling in BonEcho is almost unusably slow, but with Firefox it's a breeze.

I never liked Mozilla's strict "we need to see every single patch before you can call it Firefox" branding policy, but it really does make sense.

EDIT: Seriously, this is a stunning improvement for me, pages seem to load faster, tab switching is faster, reloading is faster, essentially anything having to do with page display/redisplay is MUCH faster. Suddenly Firefox doesn't feel bloaty anymore.

Last edited by stojic (2008-02-26 17:59:32)

Bogart

Member

From: Madrid, Spain

Registered: 2005-06-22

Posts: 262

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

The problem with font ligatures happens when you build Firefox (BonEcho) against the system pango/cairo libraries. The official build is statically linked, so it doesn't suffer from this problem.

Verdana and Bitstream Vera don't have ligatures, so they're not affected. My workaround was changing to Bitstream Vera (I don't like how Verdana is displayed in Linux), but this font is not maintained for ages and lacks many characters (east European ones, for example). So it's not an ideal solution either.

Suddenly Firefox doesn't feel bloaty anymore.

Yes!

eerok

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2005-03-20

Posts: 171

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

The problem with font ligatures happens when you build Firefox (BonEcho) against the system pango/cairo libraries. The official build is statically linked, so it doesn't suffer from this problem.

Verdana and Bitstream Vera don't have ligatures, so they're not affected. My workaround was changing to Bitstream Vera (I don't like how Verdana is displayed in Linux), but this font is not maintained for ages and lacks many characters (east European ones, for example). So it's not an ideal solution either.

That explains things more clearly.  I didn't understand how problems with one font could be a showstopper, but now I get it.

And of course curiosity got the better of me and I decided to try firefox-official.  Seems pretty nice, thanks for the package

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noobus in perpetuus

berbae

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 885

Re: Official Firefox vs. BonEcho

Bogart wrote:
The problem with font ligatures happens when you build Firefox (BonEcho) against the system pango/cairo libraries.

But there were the patches firefox-1.5-pango-cursor-position.patch and firefox-2.0-pango-ligatures.patch which corrected the problem. And they have been removed since Firefox 2.0.0.12 release.
I think they could be re-enabled with a modification of the new Iceweasel patch fom Debian which has been added.
I proposed that solution in a comment in the FS#6087 bug report: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6087
I hope that someone will try it.

Yes it's true that the DejaVu fonts have many more characters than Bitstream Vera and are maintained yet.
The DejaVu fonts are pretty good for Linux and I prefer to use them than any others.

I think also that the integrated optimized binary package Firefox/BonEcho for Arch is good to keep.
So I hope that a solution will be found and implemented soon.
Thanks to the contributors.

Last edited by berbae (2008-02-27 16:30:56)