UPDATE: 1.5.0.2 shared build is here.

Tired of switching back to the Firefox 1.0.7 whenever viewing Kannada websites, I decided that I would try a hand at building the latest Firefox (1.5) from source.

I built it, with an installer, on my Ubuntu Breezy Badger installation (i686, Kernel 2.6.12-10-386). Now, Indic appears fine and clear on Firefox, and I'm able to use SCIM too! How cool is that? :)

The default package available for download from Mozilla site segfaults with SCIM on Ubuntu Breezy. (and if you use some other IM module, it works fine but doesn't obviously allow you to use SCIM).

I tested the built package on my laptop (which runs Ubuntu Breezy as well), and had no problems whatsoever. You might or might not run into issues on other distributions... those who try it on other distributions, leave a comment on whether it worked for you.

You can Download the package from here.

Please note: The package is built with the latest Pango. Ubuntu users will need to have atleast 1.10.1-0 downloaded and installed from the Ubuntu repository.
UPDATE: This package might not work for Debian Sarge and Sid users. You might get an error saying:

./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This excerpt from IRC chat should sum up the problem:

Dec 14 14:57:28 sunilmohan hpnadig: on debian its 1.8.x for sid.
Dec 14 14:58:25 hpnadig its 1.10.1-0 ubuntu1 as per ubuntu versioning
Dec 14 14:58:59 sunilmohan hpnadig: thats it
Dec 14 14:59:08 sunilmohan hpnadig: pango version is 1.10.1
Dec 14 14:59:33 sunilmohan hpnadig: and it has an additional backend that uses cairo for rendering
Dec 14 14:59:51 sunilmohan hpnadig: that is why you will find libpangocario in your machine
Dec 14 15:00:09 sunilmohan hpnadig: on debian sid it is still 1.8.x so libpangocario will be missing