Firefox Acid3 test builds

[prodigy_]

Could you people please start a separate topic Titled something like "Should Firefox support SVG fonts?

What would be the purpose of that? By now for FF "SVG fonts implementation" and "passing Acid3" are basically synonyms.

The real major problem, however, isn't fonts. It's the unwillingness to recognize issues (that have been existing for years) as such. Read the discussion of Bug 119490 for example. It's been all rhetorics and zero action. By the way, nearly eight years have passed since the original report.

You shouldn't forget that the same kind of denial was the most important cause of the ongoing IE downfall. It's not that IE was bad all along. Once (around v4) it actually delivered better rendering than most other browsers and was way more stable than Netscape. But IE developers thought they can ignore standards forever. They fell behind with innovations and security. And - just five years after the peak - nearly half of the market share was lost.

Mozilla is making the same mistake right now. When everyone says: "guys, you have a problem here", you probably have a problem even if you really don't want to accept it. In the meanwhile, Chrome popularity is on the rise. And FF doesn't even have the inherent benefit of being an integral part of the world's most popular OS. You still think FF will be falling as gracefully as IE? Think twice.

[schapel]

Can you give a good reason why Firefox should support SVG fonts? It doesn't seem to be an issue for web developers. Besides, if a web developer want to use SVG fonts, lack of support in IE is a bigger issue than lack of support in Firefox. I suppose if IE supports SVG fonts and Firefox doesn't, that could cause a problem with some cites not working. In that case, I'm sure Mozilla developers will get right on it.

[Philip Chee]

Can you give a good reason why Firefox should support SVG fonts? It doesn't seem to be an issue for web developers. Besides, if a web developer want to use SVG fonts, lack of support in IE is a bigger issue than lack of support in Firefox. I suppose if IE supports SVG fonts and Firefox doesn't, that could cause a problem with some cites not working. In that case, I'm sure Mozilla developers will get right on it.

While nomally true, in this case there appears to be some ideological resistance from the Mozilla lead developer (roc) in this part of the Mozilla/Firefox code.

Phil

[schapel]

My understanding is that roc is working on layers/compositing so that scrolling will be smoother and won't consume so much CPU. That is something that users have complained about quite a bit here over the past several years. I think he's making the right decision by working on that instead of SVG fonts, which will make little difference to users right now.

[wgianopoulos]

Let me try to explain exactly what the issues are with SVG fonts. This is based on my current understanding of the issues. I might be misstating fact here, so take this all with a grain of salt, but I think this is close to the situation.

1. The justification in the SVG font specification for defining them no longer exists since browsers now support @font-face for providing a mechanism for downloading fonts form the website.
2. The SVG font specification defines not only a new format for specifying fonts, but also a method to define how they can be downloaded form a website that is not compatible with the new web browser standard way of doing this via @font-face.
3. SVG fonts seem that perhaps they have a place as new way to specify a font as it seems to be an easy way for a company to create a new and distinctive font to be used for a Corporate logs (this seems to be the main valid use case). However, once defined via this font Corporations would usually be converted to an image to ensure the proper display to protect the trademark.

EDIT: Sorry I had a PC issue there.

4. The two major reason anyone is interested in SVG fonts at this point is because:
a: it was made part of the acid3 test
b. it is the only font format supported for downloadable fonts on the iphone

5. The only fonts I see available for inclusion via SVG seem to be proprietary fonts converted to SVG via a tool that are already available in their native format for inclusion in Firefox via the supported @font-face.
6. It is not at all clear that in any of these cases that the conversion of these fonts to SVG format and making them available in the SVG format utilizing these conversion utilities via a download from a website does not violate the license for use of the font as specified by the font foundry in their license conditions.

EDIT:

So the point of all of this that I ma trying to make is that.SVG fonts as specified in he SVG specification might make sense in an SVG viewer application, it does NOT fit in well with the standards for font support in a web browser.