Firefox 3.0.3 Character Encoding Problems

If you are using Firefox 3.0.3 with Windows XP or Vista, chances are many websites will display strange symbols and Latin characters instead of English letters. Though the latest version of Firefox is 3.0.5, many people are still using an older version of Firefox 3 and seeing garbage instead of legible text on many websites.

Character Encoding, simply put, is the code a computer or website uses to determine how text, or characters with more than one byte are translated for the viewer. Have you ever visited a Japanese or Korean website and noticed how anything not written in English letters look like small boxes? That happens because your computer is not set up for Asian encoding. Unfortunately for Firefox 3.0.3 browser users, something similar happens between two types of "English" output when pages are coded incorrectly.

Two main types of encoding are commonly used: Western (ISO-8859-1) and Unicode (UTF-8). When a healthy Firefox setup looks at well-coded websites, it can switch effortlessly between sites with different types of character encoding. The problem lies when a website has conflicting code, such as when a website editor wants to code one way, and the coder wants the output to be a different character set.

For instance, when the header is coded in Western (ISO-8859-1) and someone adds the following HTML meta tag:

 meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

the Western encoding will trump the meta tag, and that's why only the header will look like ÉÅÐØÆÁÔÝ instead of something readable, but the rest of the website reads correctly.

Websites coded in PHP run a higher risk of malfunctioning when an extra encoding code is present, and anything coded in Unicode will present with strange character to output ratios. For example, the word "encoding" has 8 letters, but confused PHP using the wrong encoding will see a longer string of letters - another reason the output will look squished going from Western to Unicode on PHP websites.

The easiest way for the average person to fix this problem is to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox, which is version 3.0.5 at the time of publishing. If for whatever reason you don't want to, or can't upgrade, you will have to mess around with the encoding options every time you run into a site with gibberish.

To set the character encoding, open a Firefox browser and select View/Character Encoding and switch back and forth between Western (ISO-8859-1) and Unicode (UTF-8). It will change automatically, meaning you won't have to refresh the page or restart the browser.

For web developers running into a problem with a website, a quick way to determine your setup is to open your website in a Firefox browser, right click and select "View Page Info". There you will see if you have a conflict on websites that contain both, Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 and then the meta tag:

 meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

or some variation of both. On the Page Info pop-up, the main encoding will be at the top, and the secondary encoding code will be seen in the white meta tags section. If they are different, you should delete the meta tag.

For whatever reason, the latest version of Firefox, and the earlier 2.0 versions don't have issues with dodgy encoding. Still, many people frequently run into this problem and are unable to find a solution online. Hopefully this guide will help eliminate this error once and for all.