I dont know whether the Indic fonts are installed by default or not, but similar to Mac OS X you should be able to run Windows setup CD/DVD and add the font package from there.Firefox redering of Malayalam is currently a little buggy. Mozilla Firefox, although a highly recommended browser, does not yet offer great support for rendering Malayalam (The chillus are a problem).If you are attempting to read Malayalam, Internet Explorer offers the most accurate rendering.If Mozilla's support is frustrating you then you might want to checkout konqueror. Konqueror: Konqueror is the native browser of KDE environment and I have heard that it has great support for international text.To compile Mozilla with pango enabled you have to configure with -enable-pango option. Pango is a better choice for redering Indic scripts but its disabled by default because pango makes the browser slightly slower. Mozilla/Firefox: Mozilla, Firefox and other Mozilla derived browsers have 2 options for font rendering.The capabilities and version of your operating system might also come into play GNU/Linux So you are better off getting the latest version of your web browser. The developement in the Indic scene is so fast nowadays that its common to see drastic improvements between browser versions released just a couple of months apart. Since Unicode has gained popularity recently, If you use old browsers they might not have the capability to understand Unicode and hence they might display garbage.