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

Character Encoding is changing random

  • 4
  • 12
  • 11 views
  • Nzaghachi ikpeazụ nke blub

more options

Hello,

For a short while I'm having the next problem: When I am using FireFox, after a while characters on pages are showed as 'boxes'. With setting backView -> Character Encoding to ISO-8859-1 the characters are shown correctly again.

I do not understand why the character encoding is changing random to UTF-8, while I have selected the ISO-8859-1 and set automatically recognize to false.

In the options menu I have also set default 'ISO-8859-1' as default character encoding.

Hoping someone can tell me why it random changes and why the same page can be show correctly for 10 times, but the 11th time the character set has changed? And of course how can I solve this problem.

Hello, For a short while I'm having the next problem: When I am using FireFox, after a while characters on pages are showed as 'boxes'. With setting backView -> Character Encoding to ISO-8859-1 the characters are shown correctly again. I do not understand why the character encoding is changing random to UTF-8, while I have selected the ISO-8859-1 and set automatically recognize to false. In the options menu I have also set default 'ISO-8859-1' as default character encoding. Hoping someone can tell me why it random changes and why the same page can be show correctly for 10 times, but the 11th time the character set has changed? And of course how can I solve this problem.

All Replies (4)

more options

It is the server that determines the encoding that web pages used by sending a HTTP response header. Firefox only uses the default if the server doesn't send a header with an encoding and there is also no meta tag to specify an encoding (Tools > Page Info > General).

more options

I do know a website can determine the character encoding, but the strange part of the problem I occur is that the same page can be shown 10 times correctly, but an 11th time the characters like é and ë, are shown as 'blocks'/'questionmarks'.

Is there an explanation for that behaviour?

Edeziri site na blub

more options

That shouldn't happen randomly. A possible cause can be security software that has modified some HTTP response headers. Firefox extensions are a less likely cause.

more options

If security software should cause this behaviour, it is not logical the same page is correct for 10 times and another time not.

Could it be a bug in FireFox, or could a reinstall of FireFox work? Maybe some other settings in Windows have infulence on this?

Edeziri site na blub