Like many things in Gnome and Ubuntu, probably broken, with no-one able or willing to fix it. It seems these features are left in the menus, perhaps with the icon deactivated, as little cowpies for novice users to step into so that the cognoscenti can lean back in their easy chairs and chuckle at us rubes. In the alternative, they may be left in the menus in a forlorn hope that if enough people stumble across their non-functionality, someone may eventually step forward and try to fix the applications.
While installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS a few days ago I found that the "Report a problem ..." icon also didn't work. Clicking on it with the System Monitor running produced about a half-second blip of activity in the System Monitor, and then -- nothing! I posted a question and within 24 hours got the reply that this feature was broken and non-working, and had been that way for years; in other words, the executable has been replaced with a dummy program that runs and does nothing, not even displaying a dialog box that the program is a dummy. The same may be true of Gnome Font Viewer.
This is an example of the things about Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular that really frosts me and makes me continue to use an assortment of Microsoft Windows machines for real work. Canonical is missing the boat by allowing this kind of stuff to go on. It generates plenty of ill will, even if Ubuntu is available for "free".
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