Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

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 suddenly displays all pages in completely unreadable font looking like a mix of Asian locales and random symbols, while language/font settings are still correct; internet page display is hence completely broken, restart/reinstall of no help.

  • 2 balasan
  • 17 ada masalah ini
  • 2 paparan
  • Balasan terakhir oleh ngnmoz

more options

As far as I remember I opened a Japanese web page with both EN and JP text in a new tab.

A few mn later, all my (dozens of) tabs suddenly switched to a completely unreadable scramble of symbols, a mix of Japanese and other vaguely Asian characters + apparently random symbols.

I've checked my language/font settings as thoroughly as I could by using a correctly working firefox instance on another computer and navigating through menus in parallel. No visible problem there.

When I print such an unreadable page to a file, it shows correctly in the original language (French or English). When I copy/paste some of the scrambled text, the result is also displayed fine in Latin alphabet.

Restarting firefox doesn't help, with or without saving the tabs.

As far as I remember I opened a Japanese web page with both EN and JP text in a new tab. A few mn later, all my (dozens of) tabs suddenly switched to a completely unreadable scramble of symbols, a mix of Japanese and other vaguely Asian characters + apparently random symbols. I've checked my language/font settings as thoroughly as I could by using a correctly working firefox instance on another computer and navigating through menus in parallel. No visible problem there. When I print such an unreadable page to a file, it shows correctly in the original language (French or English). When I copy/paste some of the scrambled text, the result is also displayed fine in Latin alphabet. Restarting firefox doesn't help, with or without saving the tabs.

All Replies (2)

more options

Looks that something is wrong with the font that Firefox uses.

You can try to reset the preferences:

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See Basic Troubleshooting: Make a new profile

There may be extensions and plugins installed by default in a new profile, so check that in "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions & Plugins"

If that new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile (be careful not to copy corrupted files)

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

more options

Thank you very much ;-) In the meantime I just restarted my Ubuntu system and everything works fine again... Very windows-like way of troubleshooting, I fear, but it's worked so far.