266440 - character set wrongly assumed when surfing (german Umlaute displayed as "?")

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 227631

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[phil69]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

When surfing from one site to another, Firefox (wrongly) assumes, the character
set of all succeeding pages will stay the same. For example, opening from a
result in google (using unicode) to a page coded in 'Western', the browser still
decodes using unicode. The result: all special characters (french accents,
german Umlaute ä,ö,ü) are displayed as "?". Directly accessing the page works
fine, but this is not the way, most people use a search engine...

The problem is known since months and occurs in Mozilla as well. Unfortunately
this issue is not given a high priority :-(

1) Why is the assumption made, that all (succeeding) pages are coded the same?
2) Why can't Firefox after realizing, that something is wrong (by displaying
"?"'s), try to use a different character encoding table?

Regards, Philipp


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

Are you sure that the succeeding pages have a charset specified? (as META tag in
source or as HTTP header, for the latter use http://web-sniffer.net/).

related: Bug 255241 and Bug 158285

Comment 2

[OstGote!]

Per private email from reporter I can confirm that this affects only pages
without any charset encoding. So it seems to be a duplicate of bug 158285.
Please resolve it.

Comment 3

[OstGote!]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 227631 ***