SuSE 10 Beta 2's version of Firefox does not support Indic Languages correctly.
 Presumably it is *not* compiled with the system Pango libraries.

Specifically, Indic vowel reordering for vowels that should appear to the left
of consonants and ligature substitutions are not being rendered correctly.

Incorrect handling of Indic languages in Firefox is a known bug in the stock
builds of Firefox released by Mozilla.org.  However, RedHat (I believe it is in
Fedora release) and other distributors (Debian ? ) compile Firefox to use the
system-supplied Pango libraries.  There are some patches that need to be applied
and there is a configure flag (something like : "--with-Pango" ).  When compiled
to use a recent version of Pango, Firefox will support all complex-text-layout
languages supported by Pango.

My understanding of the downside of using Pango is that it impacts MathML
rendering.  I don't know the details.  The relevant question might be: Which are
there more of, (1) MathML web sites or (2) South and South-East Asian web sites
?  I would venture a guess that there must be more South and South-East Asian
web sites, and Novell/SuSE may want to expand into these markets.

Note: KDE Konqueror 3.4.2 in SuSE 10 beta 2 does have correct Indic language
support (at least for Devanagari/Hindi which is all I have tested at the moment).

- Ed Trager