Hebrew Support for Your Browser

To see all of the Hebrew on this site as it is intended to be seen, we recommend Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5.0 (IE5) or later for Windows 95 or later, for which fine Hebrew support is supplied either on installation or as a free update. We must note that sadly the Hebrew support in IE7 is inferior to the Hebrew support in IE6, due to "improvements" in the rendering engine; and unfortunately IE8 is hardly any better. Maybe IE9 will be as good as IE5 was in rendering Hebrew.

If you have IE5 or later, but it does not show our Hebrew correctly--first check that you have set the browser to choose the right encoding automatically: click on "View" on the menu at the top of the screen, and then on "Encoding", and see that "Auto-Select" is checked; if it is not, do check it. If that still does not work, you presumably need to download the free Hebrew support package: click on "Tools" on the menu at the top of the screen, and then on "Windows Update"; when you get to the Windows Update site, click on "Product Updates", and when you finally get the list of possible updates (this may take a long time), scroll down to the "Hebrew support" and get it. (While you are there, if you see any Critical Updates, you should also get them.)

Standard Windows Hebrew support does include vowels, but it does not include cantillation marks in our Bible with Cantillation Marks. To support cantillation marks and not see black rectangles, you need to install a special font supporting cantillation marks.

If you have Linux or insist on using the Mozilla Firefox under Windows instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, most recent versions of Firefox do support the Hebrew on our site including vowels and cantillation marks. Note, however, that Firefox 13 has a bug that makes words like יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisrael) look very ugly; and here is the cure:

Open a new tab by clicking on the + at the end of the set of tabs.
Press alt-d and type "about:config" (without quotation marks) and press Enter. Your browser may warn you that this is dangerous, but do not worry!
In the Search box copy/paste "gfx.font_rendering.harfbuzz.scripts" (without quotation marks) from here; you will find that the current value is 7.
Right click on the value of 7, choose Modify, type in 3 and press Enter.
Close the tab, as your Firefox 13 bug is fixed.

The bug has been fixed in Firefox 13.0.1; so you can also fix it by updating to that version.

If you have a MAC, Microsoft's Internet Explorer does not properly support our normal right-to-left Hebrew, but Apple Safari does reportedly support our Hebrew (even with vowels) and there is Firefox for the MAC as well as Windows and Linux. We have abandoned our previous plans for versions for Visual Hebrew for older browsers (Left-to-Right "Euro" fonts) and Mac's unique RTL Hebrew.

For a much more detailed explanation of setting up Hebrew on your Windows or Mac browser including typing in Hebrew for search boxes and the like (not just passively seeing Hebrew), visit City Wall!

If you have any questions or comments, We intend to answer all real (non-junk non-virus) mail within a day or two; so if you do not hear from us within three days, please write again assuming that either your letter or our answer has been lost, which is hardly rare these days. Note that letters with attached programs that can be run and letters with huge attachments are automatically rejected. The hundreds of letters we get each month have helped us improve the site greatly, and we thank you for your on-going help: God bless you all!

last updated: 17 June 2012