Summary: A twelve-month-old chromium bug, causing alphabet character spacing issues on Korean web pages, was resolved recently. However, There’s another unresolved internationalization bug in an open-source browser affecting Korean users.
Chrome: Case closed for Now
Google released Chrome 37 stable version last year. It has a problem. Several Windows OS users in Korea said that the browser shows alphabet character spacing incorrectly in specific situation. This issue, common in Korean internet usage, was very annoying for Korean users.
The bug was already posted on the official Chromium project website since Jul 16, 2014. The Chrome stable version was released on Aug 26. During that time, about 40 days, There were no comments from Google on the website.
So it was a predictable result that many Korean users suffered from what install the most updated version of google browser. Since the beginning of distribution Chrome, they left comments like such as “fix the bug please” on the project page.
A few days later from the released, a Google engineer appeared out. This person left only one comment that “Moving all nonessential bugs to the next Milestone.” In other words, “We don’t think about this bug so much seriously, right now.”
After about a year, more Korean Chrome users left dozens of comments complaining it on the ‘issue 394585’ page. Google engineers were silent. Instead, several engineers were engaged as members of Chromium community.
At last, the bug was solved on Aug 31, 2015. Nobody complains about the issue anymore. Wow. Almost it took to resolve the issue a year from the release date of the browser contains the bug.
Firefox: I have no idea
Mozilla released Firefox 41 on Sep 25, 2015. They said the newest browser is available with “Enhance IME support on Windows (Vista +) using TSF (Text Services Framework).” Firefox 41 is also named “stable version”, but it has a bug linked to Korean IME of modern Windows OS.
As a Korean Firefox for Windows user, I faced problem with the new version when writing with web-based text editor in Korean on various websites, including Facebook and other major websites for consumers and business users, my browser doesn’t take it correctly.
So I wrote a report about it roughly on Mozilla community Korea about a week ago. Since then, I have got a dozen comments on my bug report page. There are many users stating they have the same problem.
The Bugzilla, Mozilla’s official bug report website, already has a report describes ‘bug 1208043’ similar the bug what I reported on the Korea community site. However, I couldn’t fully understand its meaning so I’m not sure if they refer to the same issue.
I discussed my bug report to a Mozilla QA engineer. The engineer said “It appeared on Mac before, So I think it’s a kind of regression…. However, I just upgraded Firefox 41 on my Mac, and this bug doesn’t reproduce now.”
And I asked the engineer some guidance for “effective bug reporting skill” on the Bugzilla. The engineer suggest, “Submit bugs to ‘Internationalization component’ on bugzilla.mozilla.org site directly. You don’t need to rewrite it, just putting the words ‘Korean input’ on the subject is good. If you attach some video to it, would be helpful.”
Added on June 9th, 2024: I’m still using Firefox, the version 115.11.0 esr, and the Microsoft Edge(I don’t give to any interest on its version) simultaneously. Luckly, the bug in Firefox 41 stable version seems to have been resolved.
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Originally posted on Medium on June 26th, 2016. Migrated here on April 2nd, 2017. Edited and published on January 10th, 2018. Re-edited on June 9th, 2024.