Anybody else getting funky characters in Firefox 3?

[Toasty]

I've used FF3 off and on before today on several different systems, but today I decided to go for it and install the recent release candidate on my main PC. But it seems like any place that a non-ASCII character is used on a webpage, FF3 uses a funny hexadecimal character to represent it. (See image below.) FF2 never did this (looking at that same page, it seems that FF2 ignores these characters altogether), and I'm wondering if anyone knows what's up with that and if it's possible to get the old behavior back, or maybe even get it to display those characters correctly?

 

[t0rek]

I've been using RCs for a while now. Please give me some URLs to test them. I haven't experience that

 

[Toasty]

Here's an example with some Japanese characters.

On Firefox 2 these were rendered as question marks, like so:


But Firefox 3 uses the hexadecimal representations:


I guess I was wrong about FF2 always ignoring such characters, as it does insert question marks there, but the hex characters in FF3 just bug me for some reason. I'm surprised I haven't seen more complaints about this, as I've seen this behavior on all the systems I've used FF3 on (including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Ubuntu).

 

[t0rek]

dunno really, I see the japanese characters in both FF2 and FF3. I don't see any question symbols or hexadecimal characters.

I guess you didn't install the Oriental Characters support thing for Windows

 

[Toasty]

It's not just oriental characters though. It seems like every public page that has these characters has vanished now that I try to find one (it figures), but here's an excerpt from my homepage:
http://files.filefront.com/funnyhtml/;10603318;/fileinfo.html

It renders like so:

 

[t0rek]

mmm, they finally appeared here... dunno

 

[Toasty]

Well I'm glad it's not just me.

 

[thepreserver]

I recall experiencing it yesterday when looking up a YouTube video that said High Quality. Yup....

 

[Cyberman]

I believe Firefox and other web browsers show a symbol that represents whatever encoded symbol it doesn't understand. If you for example do not have a Korean character set, some Korean sites will show a lot of that. Ditto with Chinese and Japanese sites. I think you will see on Hebrew sites as well. Depends on what the author entered. I don't believe it's a bug.

Cyb

 

[smcd]

@Cyb yep that sounds about right. I've had this happen a few times in other programs too

 

[Toasty]

I figured as much. It's just that the old way of dealing with them was so much... better. At least IMHO. Whenever there's an opening or closing ' or " I see annoying numbers now instead of nothingness.

 

[Toasty]

After a little research (in a completely different project, actually) I figured out why the characters in question can't/shouldn't be displayed properly; they are encoded as Windows-1252 characters, but the page's encoding is UTF-8. So, the webpage itself (or rather the one who created it) is ultimately what's at fault. It would still be nice to have FF2's handling of these situations back though.