1199921 - Font autoinstallation support follow-up

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Original description of bug 467729 from Fedora maintainer:

> The Linux platform is gaining an on-demand font autoinstallation framework (BSD
> and Solaris will probably follow eventually).
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutomaticFontInstallation
> 
> Firefox should be plugged into it and use it to request the fonts the pages it renders need. This would have a huge user impact, especially for pages that have strong i18n constrains.
> 
> Unlike proposals such as @font-face and EOT the fonts are sourced from trusted user-controlled sources, are properly vetted legal-side, use the latest font versions not old obsolete ones (with bug fixes), and are installed system-wide where other apps can take advantage of them.

After bug 619521 and bug 467729 it is possibly to implement that as an addon using Javascript and XPCOM: https://github.com/fred-wang/MissingFontsNotifier

However, after Mozilla's announcement about this is not a long term solution:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/

So I'm reopening this as a follow-up of bug 467729...

Note: See bug 1007090 comment 14 for the status of math fonts on Linux.