Bad Text On Firefox

[Manic]

For some time now, I've been getting these strange boxes that I can only assume are substitutes for non-Roman/Latin text. Though I wouldn't be able to read them either way, I'd at least like to know if I'm looking at Chinese han or Japanese kana.

It's especially annoying when I'm at a multilingual website or looking up anime.

Is there any particular add-on anyone can recommend? Because I'm basically too lazy to read through all of their "language support" descriptions and reviews.

 

[bgates87]

Those look like little boxes with hex numbers in them. I've never seen a browser do that before. Anyway, you could try changing your character encoding settings to auto-detect Chinese. You'd find that in the menu here;

View > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect > Chinese
(The menu path might be a little different if you're using a different version of FireFox than I am)

I don't know if that will do anything other than turn those little boxes into question marks (that's what I see) but it's worth a shot. Beyond that, I don't know of anything else to try. Has FireFox always done this for you or did it used to display the characters correctly and had just begun displaying them incorrectly?

Edit: If you try this and it doesn't work don't forget to change the Character Encoding back to whatever it was before.

 

[Manic]

I tried changing the Character Encoding, but that doesn't seem to be helping.

I was getting question marks before, which didn't bother me. I started getting the boxes when I switched to Firefox 3 a couple of months back.

 

[bgates87]

That's weird. It looks like it's a problem unique to FireFox 3, here's a bug report I found from someone else who seems to be having a similar problem;

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comments_parentId=93607&forumId=1

They also say that they can't get images to display so maybe it's not the exact same problem but it seems apparent to me that it's probably just a bug unique to FireFox 3 that's causing it to display those boxes instead of question marks or correct characters. Or maybe it's not a bug at all, maybe the developers thought those symbols would be more helpful than question marks. After all, you could probably figure out what character is supposed to be there using the hex numbers displayed in those symbols, but I wouldn't know how.