Browsers

Modern browsers support Unicode, but some have problems with combining characters (i.e. characters with separately encoded diacritics) and with characters in the Private Use Area (PUA). Normalised texts, which do not rely on characters in the PUA, are displayed correctly by all browsers. Diplomatic texts are displayed well by many browsers, while facsimile texts are only displayed correctly with some browsers: Firefox and Ubuntu on Linux; Safari, OmniWeb and iCab on the Mac; Opera and FireFox on Windows. The reason for the failure of the other browsers seems to be the way they handle fonts.

Note that with all browsers, a correct display of texts on the facsimile and the diplomatic level requires a MUFI conformant font (see the fonts page for more information).

At the time of writing (July 2007) we have the following browser recommendations, but please note that things may change in newer versions:

Linux

Good results with:

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.12.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - the Dapper Drake - with all updates.

Thanks to Petra Steinkellner, University of Graz, for testing Linux browsers.

Mac

Safari 2.0 (included on all recent Macs), OmniWeb 5.5 and iCab 3.0 all perform well and do not seem to have any problems with displaying text, whether on a normalised, diplomatic or facsimile level.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 performs reasonably well, but seems to have problems with some characters in the Private Use Area.

Opera 9.1 displays normalised text fine, but can not display PUA characters and will thus fail with diplomatic and especially facsimile text.

Internet Explorer 5.2 is discontinued on the Mac and can not even display normalised text correctly.

Windows

Internet Explorer 7.0 performs well with texts on the diplomatic and the normalised level, but struggles with texts on the facsimile level. It introduces a number of confusing spaces between characters, and seems to have great problems with zooming (increasing or decreasing the text size) on the facsimile level.

Opera 9.1 performs well on all three levels, and seems to have no problems with zooming.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0 performs well, too, more or less identical with Opera.

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Opprettet 12 January 2007. Sist oppdatert 09.01.2008. Vevsjef. (Rediger)