Important Notice: We're experiencing email notification issues. If you've posted a question in the community forums recently, please check your profile manually for responses while we're working to fix this.

On Monday the 3rd of March, around 5pm UTC (9am PT) users may experience a brief period of downtime while one of our underlying services is under maintenance.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Text shows gray boxes with letters and numbers?

more options

Instead of showing certain characters/ASCII, it instead shows gray boxes with 4 letters/numbers. I have the "allow pages to choose their own fonts" checked, but it is the same with it on and off.

It was like this since I installed firefox, and fiddling with the font options did nothing. :/

Instead of showing certain characters/ASCII, it instead shows gray boxes with 4 letters/numbers. I have the "allow pages to choose their own fonts" checked, but it is the same with it on and off. It was like this since I installed firefox, and fiddling with the font options did nothing. :/

All Replies (1)

more options

Those are Unicode codepoints. They're displayed when there's no font that can display the character in question.

What are the websites where this happens?

What are the codes in question? Please provide a screenshot.


  1. Click the ≡ Menu Button.
  2. Click the Question Mark icon.
  3. Click Restart with Add-ons Disabled.
  4. Click Restart. Does the problem go away?