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

Default Character Encoding stuck on UTF-8 - Firefox 7

  • 1 reply
  • 8 have this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

I cannot change the Character Encoding - it is stuck on Unicode UTF-8 and I can not change it! When a web page opens I get these little boxes with "FF FD" instead of Quote marks. When I change the character encoding on that page using "View->Character Encoding" and click on the Western (ISO-8859-1), the page displays correctly. Every page opens using Unicode UTF-8 as the default.

View->Character Encoding -- shows Unicode UTF-8 as the default. View->Character Encoding->Auto-detect -- shows OFF

Tool->Options->Content->Advance->Fonts->Default Character Encoding -- shows Western (ISO-8859-1) as well as the "Allow Pages to choose their own fonts..." IS CHECKED in the check box

THE PAGES ARE NOT UTF-8!!!! The "View Page Source" IS NOT Unicode UTF-8! -- It shows <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">.

The "View Page Info" shows MetaTag - Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Why can I not change the Default Character Encoding?

I would also like to point out that the Unicode UTF-8 seems to be broken because it is indicating that the QUOTE CHARACTER is an UNPRINTABLE character "FF FD"


EDIT -----

The UTF-8 is not broken. The problem as pointed out in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replacement_character#Replacement_character is that my Firefox being STUCK processing UTF-8 encoding cannot read the clearly marked iso-8859-1 data. So the UTF-8 is reinterpreting smart quotes -“ and ”- (“ and ”) as replacement (unprintable) characters.

So the real problem is why my Firefox is stuck on Unicode UTF-8

I cannot change the Character Encoding - it is stuck on Unicode UTF-8 and I can not change it! When a web page opens I get these little boxes with "FF FD" instead of Quote marks. When I change the character encoding on that page using "View->Character Encoding" and click on the Western (ISO-8859-1), the page displays correctly. Every page opens using Unicode UTF-8 as the default. View->Character Encoding -- shows Unicode UTF-8 as the default. View->Character Encoding->Auto-detect -- shows OFF Tool->Options->Content->Advance->Fonts->Default Character Encoding -- shows Western (ISO-8859-1) as well as the "Allow Pages to choose their own fonts..." IS CHECKED in the check box THE PAGES ARE NOT UTF-8!!!! The "View Page Source" IS NOT Unicode UTF-8! -- It shows <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">. The "View Page Info" shows MetaTag - Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Why can I not change the Default Character Encoding? I would also like to point out that the Unicode UTF-8 seems to be broken because it is indicating that the QUOTE CHARACTER is an UNPRINTABLE character "FF FD" ----- EDIT ----- The UTF-8 is not broken. The problem as pointed out in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replacement_character#Replacement_character is that my Firefox being STUCK processing UTF-8 encoding cannot read the clearly marked iso-8859-1 data. So the UTF-8 is reinterpreting smart quotes -&ldquo; and &rdquo;- (“ and ”) as replacement (unprintable) characters. So the real problem is why my Firefox is stuck on Unicode UTF-8

Modified by CaptainCosmic

All Replies (1)

more options

The real problem is that the font that is used doesn't have those characters.

Do you see the special quotes -“ and ” on this forum page?

Does it help if you disable the website fonts and set another font as the default font?

  • Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced