Firefox character encoding problem

Generally the page's encoding is followed, unless the server specifies an encoding. As the <meta> tag seems to specify what you're expecting, and as manually switching to that value helps, it sounds like the server you're getting the page from is sending an incorrect encoding (Windows-1252) in the headers to the browser.

The proper way to fix it is to configure the server properly. For a company webserver, this probably means bugging the server admin to do it.

To see the (wrong) headers, if you're familiar with such tools, you can use things like Firebug's "Net" panel in Firefox, or Web Inspector's "Resources" panel in Chrome or Safari. Or, if you don't know these tools and the web site is publicly accessible, then you easily see the server's headers online using, for example, Web-Sniffer.

Assuming the login page specifies the same as the actual pages, then this yields:

Content-Type: text/html

...without any value for charset. Not sure if a browser should then still interpret that <meta> tag, but apparently Firefox is ignoring it, and making some best guess.

Firefox ignoring it might be caused by the HTML source. The <meta> tag should always be specified within <head> before anything else, as it might also apply to the title, scripts, CSS and so on. On this site, it doesn't and, even worse, the HTML is a total mess:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript SRC="/dergi/_ScriptLibrary/pm.js"></SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript>
  thisPage._location = "/dergi/giris/login.asp";
</SCRIPT>
<FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>
<HTML>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
  [..]
-->
</style>
<HEAD>
  [..]
  <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=WINDOWS-1254">
  <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
  <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="[removed to protect the innocent...]">  
  <TITLE>YAYSAT DERGİ RAPORLARI</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<center>
[..]
</center>
</body>
<INPUT type=hidden name="_method">
<INPUT type=hidden name="_thisPage_state" value="">
</FORM>
</html>

Huge developer fail.

(Incidentally, Web-Sniffer shows <meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">, but that is due to its values for Accept-Charset. Firebug shows <META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="TEXT/HTML; CHARSET=WINDOWS-1254"> just like in the question.)

quack quixote

Posted 2009-11-06T13:10:40.657

Reputation: 37 382

1The interesting thing is when I open the same page in IE8, it's displayed properly. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar – 2009-11-06T13:51:13.093

If I recall correctly then Internet Explorer was the first to use <meta> as it did not honour the response headers as sent by the server. So, IE8 might very well favour the <meta> and then ignore the value from the response headers. See also "Firefox displays garbage characters in lieu of web page" at http://superuser.com/questions/23777/firefox-displays-garbage-characters-in-lieu-of-web-page/23814#23814 for an example of how things can get messed up...

– Arjan – 2009-11-06T13:57:12.087

thx for the edits, arjan. spot on. – quack quixote – 2009-11-06T13:59:42.160

1I used Web-Sniffer and it returned the following result: Accept-Encoding: gzip[CRLF]
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF]
Does that mean the problem come definitely from the server settings? – Mehper C. Palavuzlar – 2009-11-06T14:00:34.013

Thanks very much. I will accept your answer if you please paste it as an answer. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar – 2009-11-06T14:29:04.310

That's ok; I've added it to this answer and cleaned up the comments a bit. Read, and complain to the developer! – Arjan – 2009-11-06T14:50:33.137

arjan, what have you done to my poor answer?? j/k, that's great, above and beyond the call of duty. post it as your own for god's sake so i can vote it up. – quack quixote – 2009-11-06T14:56:19.213

You need the votes, ~quack, with your lousy 4,434 reputation. ;-) – Arjan – 2009-11-06T14:59:00.020

funny, i was gonna say the same to you, seeing 's how i'm about to pass you. – quack quixote – 2009-11-06T15:01:29.547

You will soon pass me, those lousy 4,434 points only gathered in about a month :-) And feel free to remove my opinion on "Huge developer fail." ;-) – Arjan – 2009-11-06T15:04:17.593

no way, that's spot on too! – quack quixote – 2009-11-06T15:05:20.430

Firefox character encoding problem

Answers