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.

Firefox having problems with UTF-16le (Windows default unicode set)

  • 1 reply
  • 5 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

linnapaw
linnapaw
more options

I have a website where I have many different languages (English, German, Russian, Old Russian, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) and so it is pretty necessary to use a unicode set to accommodate this. For quite awhile, Windows default Unicode set is UTF-16le, so that is what I use, and every page within this site has that coded in the header for browsers to recognise. This site had been tested with Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Kylo, and even Netscape, and there was no problem. Within the last couple months, however, Firefox has released updates which have garbled my site, and even when I manually set the encoding to UTF-16le, my links to amazon are rendered completely unusable, and if I navigate away from the page and then click back to a page using the back button, Firefox once again renders it as garbage.

I have a website where I have many different languages (English, German, Russian, Old Russian, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) and so it is pretty necessary to use a unicode set to accommodate this. For quite awhile, Windows default Unicode set is UTF-16le, so that is what I use, and every page within this site has that coded in the header for browsers to recognise. This site had been tested with Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Kylo, and even Netscape, and there was no problem. Within the last couple months, however, Firefox has released updates which have garbled my site, and even when I manually set the encoding to UTF-16le, my links to amazon are rendered completely unusable, and if I navigate away from the page and then click back to a page using the back button, Firefox once again renders it as garbage.

All Replies (1)

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

The server sends the page as UTF-8. You will have to change that to UTF-16 to avoid such problems. Firefox will ignore a BOM in the file if the server specifies an encoding in the HTTP response headers.