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.

Avatar for Username

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

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Question marks when viewing web pages

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

dpd
dpd
more options

Hi,

I've been getting question marks instead of words (typefaces) when I load some websites. This isn't consistent. When I use Safari, everything is just fine. Even Chrome.

I've tried everything I could find worth trying in other peoples' queries with no luck.

This is super frustrating.

Deb

Hi, I've been getting question marks instead of words (typefaces) when I load some websites. This isn't consistent. When I use Safari, everything is just fine. Even Chrome. I've tried everything I could find worth trying in other peoples' queries with no luck. This is super frustrating. Deb
Attached screenshots

All Replies (1)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

This likely means that Firefox isn't able to access the requested font locally and falls back to a 'last resort' font that shows all glyphs as a '?' or an 'A'.

You can check in the Rules tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font-family is used for selected text. You can check in the Font tab in the right panel in the Inspector what font is actually used because Firefox might be using a different font than specified by the website.

You can check for sandbox security issues when Firefox has a problem to access fonts installed locally.

You can set this pref to 2 or 1 on the about:config page to reduce the sandbox security level.

  • security.sandbox.content.level = 1
  • close and restart Firefox to make the change effective.

If '1' still doesn't have effect then try '0' to disable the sandbox.

If this didn't work then undo/reverse the change and reset the pref via the right-click context menu to the default value.

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.

See also:

Modified by cor-el