Preferences language selection overloads my browser because of all the fonts

[RadoS]

Moinsen,

can you please somehow reduce the load on the browser for displaying all the fonts in the list?
Like, maybe show only the names in Latin font by default (without font sample or the font name in its own font!), and only show the national font when selected.

[Gryzor]

What?

[RadoS]

D'oh.

Ok, step by step:
- when I open Preferences
- there is this point  User profile -> Language
- all languages are shown with their _native_ font
- there are _A LOT_ of them, and many of them are complicated to display
- loading all those fonts and displaying them all _freezes_ my browsers until it's finished, which takes several minutes.

Possible Solutions:
- don't list languages in their native fonts but use western-latin-1 (iso-8859-1 or ascii) for all (only in the preferences: when chosen of course display the selected font).
- Make the "Languages" a separate sub-page, not to list the selection with the long list of fonts directly in the Preferences page.

[Gryzor]

Other possible solution: use a proper browser :p

I tried it with Opera and Firefox at my work's severely under-powered desktop, while running several other apps, and no problem there... anyone else having this?

Cheers
Gryzor

[RadoS]

Other possible solution: use a proper browser :p

I tried it with Opera and Firefox at my work's severely under-powered desktop, while running several other apps, and no problem there... anyone else having this?

Sadly there is no other than firefox and I'm not allowed to install.

BTW, this is on unix + X11, so might be different to M$-windows, where font-handling could be different.

Note, the hardware _is not_ weak: lots of RAM + enough CPU power to do much useless crap, but the fonts nearly kill my firefox.

[Gryzor]

So you're using Unix at work but have no rights to install other programs? Wow, that's a first...

I would have to check the sources of Mediawiki, but I'm rather confident that it's a per-theme setting, so not that easy to unroot... Tell you what, why don't you set your preferences on a windows box using your username? The system should keep it...

Cheers
Gryzor

[RadoS]

Tell you what, why don't you set your preferences on a windows box using your username? The system should keep it...

Sure it will keep it, but ...
a) I usually don't sit at windows => PITA generally, even moreso just for this single page.
b) I don't change language that often (actually every user will set this at most once at all). But  still each time I visit the preferences page the fonts for all langs are loaded, even though I don't want to change it. However, skins or mail-notification could be changed once in a while (or some other minor feature from the preferences), sooo ... moving the lang seems appropriate (if it's easy to achieve).

Maybe somebody familiar with X11 fonts can explain this loading overkilling the browser/X11 and how to fix it?!