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.

When I open an html file saved in UTF-8 format the 3-byte file header (usually hex EF BB BF) is shown as text at top-left. How can I avoid this - all other browsers interpret the header correctly and don't show it.

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

nickbuck
nickbuck
more options

I write VB apps that create web pages for international sports scoring systems, and these must be able to show Latin, Cyrillic, eastern names etc. that require 2-bytes for some characters in the text. This means saving in UTF-8 to avoid 8-bit ASCII files being created. UTF-8 files typically have a 3-byte header = hex EB BB BF, and with all browsers except Firefox this header is interpreted and not shown. Firefox however always displays these characters as  at the top-left screen position. What do I have to do the make Firefox recognize UTF-8 files, or do to my UTF-8 files to work properly with Firefox?

See http://www.iacusn.org/USN2010/results/ for a typical recent example.

I write VB apps that create web pages for international sports scoring systems, and these must be able to show Latin, Cyrillic, eastern names etc. that require 2-bytes for some characters in the text. This means saving in UTF-8 to avoid 8-bit ASCII files being created. UTF-8 files typically have a 3-byte header = hex EB BB BF, and with all browsers except Firefox this header is interpreted and not shown. Firefox however always displays these characters as  at the top-left screen position. What do I have to do the make Firefox recognize UTF-8 files, or do to my UTF-8 files to work properly with Firefox? See http://www.iacusn.org/USN2010/results/ for a typical recent example.

All Replies (1)

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

You see that UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) because of the content type specification in the page code. 

content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"


If you remove that or change it to utf-8 then Firefox won't show that BOM as text. There is however no need to insert that BOM at the start of the file. You can also configure the server to send the file (all files) as utf-8.