Web Browsers (2003-07-17)

Index

Introduction

Locale mechanism is not sufficient for web browsers. It is because web pages are written in various languages and various codesets and web browsers have to deal with all of them regardless of LANG variable.

Also, GUI-based web browsers may want to set the window title using the web page title. Web browsers have to convert the text from web page's encoding to the locale's encoding.


Mozilla (1.3.1) can display Japanese and other languages. The proportion has been improved since version M12 but it is not as beautiful as Latin-1 languages because of lack of fonts. It is not likely that XFree86 will have enough numbers of fonts for Japanese and other multibyte languages because they need large disk space, even XFree86's fonts are migrating into Unicode these days!

Galeon (1.3.5) can display Japanese and other languages. It is natural because it uses the same rendering engine to Mozilla.

Dillo (0.7.2) cannot display Japanese or other multibyte languages.

Encompass (0.4.99.30) cannot display Japanese or other multibyte languages.


Tomohiro KUBOTA <debian at tmail dot plala dot or dot jp>