Firefox 3 Question Mark Diamond

July 27, 2008 in fixes | 3 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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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.