STIX fonts for clients

With the release of Mozilla's Firefox3-Candidate1, the release of the
stable version is expected soon. I belong to the academic community
that seeks the use of the native Firefox MathML support. There is a
long debate between people with the same interest as mine and the
developers of the Firefox browser, about delivering or not the STIX
fonts to clients using MathML as one package together with the
browser's download. References for this debate can be found in:
1. The bug report 295193 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295193
).
2. The bug report 415223 ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415223
).
3. In the present list ( http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.mathml/browse_thread/thread/27000c43ddc95c12
).
My argument is that there is a simple solution, which can satisfy both
sides, and bring benefit to the spread of MathML.

I am trying to summarize the view for delivering the STIX fonts
together with the browser's download:

The academic clients are not developers. They need the computer as a
mean of helping them to meet the challenges of research and teaching.
They need something simple that works, without following instructions
that they don't understand, no matter how clear they are. A simple
example is the use of MathML by Firefox2. The Window's installer of
the fonts for MathML was straight-forward even for most of the
academic clients. For Mac the instructions needed the help of a
computer expert, and even he was warned about avoiding a bug that was
explained elsewhere. For Linux it was catastrophic, even an expert
could not always help. On top a person with the root password should
also be called.  If Windows is the dominant platform, is it worth
bothering with the others?

What was the result? Only Window's clients (and they are not too many
in the academic community) could benefit. Mac and Linux clients had to
give up. On the other hand the main purpose of MathML is to be used
for mathematical expressions, and not too many people are using them,
with the exception of some academic staff.

Now let's see what are the opposing arguments of the browser's
developers, and they make sense:

If the browser delivers also the necessary fonts, the downloading time
of the browser will increase substantially, discouraging that way
people of using the Firefox browser. This argument is probably the
most easy to overcome, by presenting to the users the choice of adding
the fonts during the downloading of the browser. Furthermore the space
of all the STIX fonts (not zipped) take is less than 1.2 MB , which is
less than 16% of the space needed for downloading the browser today
(7.5 MB). So far some of the browser's developers accept this
solution.

The next argument is much heavier, but in my opinion there is a work-
around. The argument says that downloading the fonts is not enough,
one have to install them. The installation procedure differs from
platform to platform and it is a very heavy task to be done by a
browser. I agree, but why install the fonts in the system? Just put
them somewhere in a directory of the browser's software. They don't
have to be installed in the system. The browser should take care to
look for these fonts in the appropriate directory, when a <math ..>
element is encountered, instead of looking among the installed fonts
in the system (as for now). If a developer wants to use the STIX fonts
for another than math purpose, he has to install them in the system
(in addition to the same - existing in the browser).

As an example of this work-around, the MathPlayer plug-in of Design
Science for Internet Explorer uses math fonts, which are included in
the plug-in itself. It does not require installing the fonts.

Hope that the just proposed solution can be easily implemented, and
we'll witness soon Firefox3 free of installing separately the STIX
fonts.