Comment 117 for bug 32561

A few extra points...

Distributors (e.g., Redhat and SuSE) have in the past been forced to update Firefox to new major versions even on their stable (supported for several years) product lines, in order to keep up to date with security fixes. This may or may not happen again, but it seems wise to keep the dependency requirements at a minimum just in case it does.

Let's not lose sight of vlad's comment #32. We can use pangocairo if available at runtime, if there's a benefit.

Just in case some people aren't aware, the Redhat Pango patch for FF1.5/2, and our current trunk cairo/Pango code, abuse Pango badly. They create Pango objects every time we draw a string or measure text *word by word*. The new textframe code should help a lot, by letting us create Pango objects just once, for large chunks of text (per text node), and thus considerably reduce the 400% pageload hit that Boris quoted. So it's premature to draw specific conclusions about the whole-browser performance impact of Pango ... but it will still be significant, for sure.

I would really really really like to have a solution for non-complex text that gives us ligatures and kerning with good performance, and I don't care what it's called or who owns it. As an eternal optimist, I refuse to believe it's impossible.