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

Firefox is displaying unreadable characters when visiting some websites like digg. The sites work fine in all other browsers. I've tried all encoding options in firefox.

  • 2 replies
  • 13 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by JesusMS

more options

Firefox is displaying unreadable characters when visiting some websites like digg. The sites work fine in all other browsers. I've tried all encoding options in firefox.

Firefox is displaying unreadable characters when visiting some websites like digg. The sites work fine in all other browsers. I've tried all encoding options in firefox.

Modified by banjar

All Replies (2)

more options

This issue can be caused by an old bitmap version of the Helvetica or Geneva font or (bitmap) fonts that Firefox can't display in that size. Firefox can't display some old bitmap fonts in a larger size and displays gibberish instead. You can test that by zooming out (View > Zoom > Zoom Out, Ctrl -) to make the text smaller.

Uninstall (remove) all variants of that not working font to make Firefox use another font or see if you can find a True type version that doesn't show the problem.

See also /tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=1...

more options

Install Greasemonkey: http://www.greasespot.net/

...and then run this script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/76541