This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

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

Website not displaying correctly. Firefox is changing the character set to Western (ISO-8859-1) automatically.

  • 3 cavab
  • 75 have this problem
  • 2 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Normally I have set Firefox (or it's set by default) to Character Set Unicode (UTF-8) and everything displays perfectly. I've never had a problem before.

Now however, whenever I upload my own website, for some bizarre reason on that particular tab (and only that tab) the Character Set is changed over to Western (ISO-8859-1) and then there's a few characters within my site that do not display correctly, namely apostrophes and hypens.

It definitely isn't my software (Serif WebPlus X4) because the page displays correctly in every other browser. Plus it displays correctly in Firefox if I change the Character set back to Unicode.

PS The site is a work in progress

Normally I have set Firefox (or it's set by default) to Character Set Unicode (UTF-8) and everything displays perfectly. I've never had a problem before. Now however, whenever I upload my own website, for some bizarre reason on that particular tab (and only that tab) the Character Set is changed over to Western (ISO-8859-1) and then there's a few characters within my site that do not display correctly, namely apostrophes and hypens. It definitely isn't my software (Serif WebPlus X4) because the page displays correctly in every other browser. Plus it displays correctly in Firefox if I change the Character set back to Unicode. PS The site is a work in progress

All Replies (3)

more options

That happens because the server sends a content-type (text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1) via the HTTP response headers and in that case that content type prevails. The page code is saved with an UTF-8 byte order mark () that you see in this case.


more options

Hey, cor-el. this has worked fine. Thanks so much. It's displaying properly now.

more options

You're welcome