220438 - Mozilla 1.4 Ignores My Default Character Encoding on Windows 2000

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[imacat]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

    When I enter a page without charset infomation in either HTTP headers and
HTML meta section, the default character encoding in my preference setting
should apply.  But it's not.  It seems that Mozilla 1.4+ interprets the
character encoding by itself with some encoding-guessing subroutine.  But that
subroutine makes mistakes all the times.  It misguessed Traditional Chinese
(Big5) pages as Simplified Chinese (GB13080) or Korean all the time.  I have to
switch the encoding back to Traditional Chinese (Big5) for every page on some
websites, and there is no shortcut key to do that.  More worse, some websites
put a lot of Big5 plain text files on them.  Plain text files has no encoding
infomation at all, so Mozilla simply put them as Simplified Chinese every time.

    I have searched Bugzilla and found in bug #79608
BrowserSetDefaultCharacterSet() is void now, and is replaced by
SetForcedCharset().  Is it true?  The 2 subroutines are quite different and
should not be mixed together.  Why don't Mozilla honor user's default character
encoding?  Won't Mozilla make mistakes?

    I have received tons of complaints from my Traditional Chinese users since
Mozilla 1.4 was released 3 months ago.  They said that Mozilla is very hard to
use now.  The text are always a mess.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the default character set to Traditional Chinese (Big5).
2. View a Big5 web page without character set specified.

Actual Results:  
The text become a mess.  The character encoding becomes Simplified Chinese
(GB18030).

Expected Results:  
Respect the user's default encoding.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Do you have charset autodetection turned on?  View > Character Coding >
Autodetect?  If so, does turning that off help?

Comment 2

[imacat]

Oh... :p
Sorry, and it is fixed. ^^;  I'm terribly sorry for this.
I'll try the same solution on my users.

Comment 3

[Jason Bassford]

Nothing in Mozilla was broken or fixed.

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

->WORKSFORME as per comments.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Actually, would you mind filing a bug on Internalization on the fact that the
auto-detection detects big5 as gb13080?  Hopefully we can rectify that
somewhat... (summary something like "charset autodetection detects big5 page to
be gb13080").

Please cc me on that bug when you file it?

Comment 6

[imacat]

Dear Jason,

    Sorry for this, and thank you for your reminding.

Dear Boris,

    Filed.

Comment 7

[Bill Mason]

Bug 220476 opened on the autodetect issue.