306436 - Wrong character encoding used

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[David Balažic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

I visited www.ati.com and got garbage displayed. See screenshot.

Cause : FF uses UTF-16 instead of correct ISO-8859-1 encoding.

I remember the same happening with certain gigabyte sites a while ago.

I tried to open the URL in a new tab, in a new window, in a tab that was showing
some other page. I all cases the page was displayed wrong. I all case I entered
the URL manually into the URL bar.
Then I went to google, searched for "ati", clicked the first result
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.ati.com/&e=9797> and it was
shown correctly!

Details:

encoding used by FF : URF-16 Little Endian
encoding used by page : ISO-8859-1
FF autodetect option : OFF

HTTP headers (gotten by wget -S http://www.ati.com/ ) :
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 1 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
 2 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
 3 Content-Type: text/html
 4 Content-Length: 34495
 5 Expires: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:32:36 GMT
 6 Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store
 7 Pragma: no-cache
 8 Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:32:36 GMT
 9 Connection: keep-alive
10 X-N: S

HTML META tag :
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; CHARSET=ISO-8859-1">

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
See above. Does not happen always.

Comment 1

[David Balažic]

Attachment: copy of HTML source of www.ati.com/

Comment 2

[David Balažic]

Attachment: Screenshot showing problem and settings

Comment 3

[u63580]

Seems to be WFM, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4)
Gecko/20050829 Firefox/1.0+

Comment 4

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050830
Firefox/1.0+ ID:2005083006

WFM

Comment 5

[David Balažic]

As I said, after clicking on the link at google, the page was displayed correctly.
After that it is always displayed coretly.
It is a hard to reproduce problem.

Comment 6

[Gordon Schumacher]

Attachment: Screenshot of a page on www.gigabyte.com.tw

Confirming that this occurs with FF 1.5b1 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4.

If I go to http://www.gigabyte.com.tw, the first time I get what appears in the
screenshot.  Clicking reload causes no change - but shift-reload causes it to
display properly.

I am forced to wonder if this is distantly related to my bug #285326...

Comment 7

[Gonzalo HIGUERA DÍAZ]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Created an attachment (id=198327) [edit]
> Screenshot of a page on www.gigabyte.com.tw
> 
> Confirming that this occurs with FF 1.5b1 - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT
> 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4.
> 
> If I go to http://www.gigabyte.com.tw, the first time I get what appears in the
> screenshot.  Clicking reload causes no change - but shift-reload causes it to
> display properly.

Using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051027 Firefox/1.5 ID:2005102703 I have no problem. Can you tell us how you go to the specific page. (ie. do you jump from a particular search engine result? Do you type the URL just after creating a new profile? etc.) This amount of information is necessary because too often Firefox decides the character encoding of a new page based on an internal character encoding history.

The problem with the page you mentioned is that it is inconsistent about its character encoding. On one hand, is written using UTF-16LE (which can be seen because the first two octets of the file are FFFE and because it displays correctly using this encoding method). However, the page specifies a UTF-8 encoding through an HTML meta tag. There is no character encoding defined using HTTP, which could override the meta tag information and be consistent with the actual encoding used.

My browser honours the FFFE sequence. Yours seems to do so at a full page reload. Unless any standard says otherwise, it is reasonable to think that the browser's behaviour be undefined (better yet, an error window should warn about the problem), and the webmaster should be informed of the problem. (I tried doing so indirectly through the "Report Broken Site..." but Firefox crashed and I can no longer do so :-|).

Comment 8

[alan ezust]

Looks like the same thing as bug 313353.

Incidentally, I have the problem in the OPPOSITE direction.
And I can't figure out what the "auto-detect" setting of character encoding actually does, since I can't seem to switch it off - even when I override it from the menu, it switches right back to the wrong one after the next refresh.


Comment 9

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This bug was reported on Firefox 2.x or older, which is no longer supported and will not be receiving any more updates. I strongly suggest that you update to Firefox 3.6.3 or later, update your plugins (flash, adobe, etc.), and retest in a new profile. If you still see the issue with the updated Firefox, please post here. Otherwise, please close as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME
http://www.mozilla.com
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+mode

Comment 10

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

No reply, INCOMPLETE. Please retest with Firefox 3.6.3 or later and a new profile (http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles). If you continue to see this issue with the newest firefox and a new profile, then please comment on this bug.