Firefox 3 Question Mark Diamond

July 27, 2008 in fixes | 6 comments

On web pages with accented characters, such as on French language websites, Firefox 3 may show a diamond question mark symbol instead of the accented character.

To fix this character set display problem in Firefox 3, change the Character Encoding under the Menu -> View -> Character Encoding from Unicode to Western ISO-8859-1 if you’re reading Western European language based web pages.

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6 comments

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September 12, 2008 at 8:07 pm

Andrew

Andrew’s avatar

Yes, this works, but only temporarily. My home page is http://www.nytimes.com, and if I close FF3 and reopen it, the character encoding gets set back to Unicode. If switch it back to Western (ISO 8859-1), the page displays correctly, but as soon as I navigate away from the page, or close/reopen the browser, it is set back to Unicode.

Is there a way to make that setting permanent? It seems like a new “feature” of FF.

Thanks.

September 12, 2008 at 8:19 pm

Ben Lam

Ben Lam’s avatar

Unfortunately, this new “feature”, is more like a bug. I’ve done a bit of searching through bug reports on Mozilla.org and there are several complaints about this.

Guess we’ll have to wait for a more permanent “feature” fix.

Best regards,
Ben

September 13, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Andrew

Andrew’s avatar

Thanks, Ben. Not sure if that’s of any comfort or not, except for the fact that I’m not alone. LOL

I wonder if Mozilla is aware and is working on a fix. It’s so annoying, and does not happen in IE 7. …. but FF is the far superior browser.

Maybe it’s time to check out Opera or Google Chrome too.

Thanks.

February 7, 2009 at 9:48 pm

Jake

Jake’s avatar

Hey folks, just came across this awesome fix and unfortunately it’s not fixed in the latest beta build :( I’m going to submit a bug report to the team.