401602 - high-ascii characters are not properly read, become "gibberish"

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Diehl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8

"proper" quotes, em dashes, copyright signs -- and, seemingly, all high-ascii characters -- are not interpreted correctly. On the page cited (marionhistory.com) a "proper" quote (closed single quote) becomes degree-sign / paragraph mark. Oddly, though, when I copy and paste it into this window, a proper quote appears. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Can't be that scientific, as it's purely a visual thing; sometimes it happens (with certain sites) and sometimes not. HOWEVER, I never noticed it prior to a week or two or three ago. And it doesn't happen everywhere; nytimes.com uses "proper" open and closed quotes, and those read just fine.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

It's probably related to the character encoding (see View menu). Do you it set to auto-detect ? It sometimes makes wrong decisions, and then you can have this behavior.

Comment 2

[Mike Diehl]

When I look at that menu, Western (ISO 8859-1) is checked, and Auto Detect is (off). Trying different settings does not change the appearance of the page in question (even after hitting Shift-refresh, and in one case even quitting and relaunching Firefox). I looked at the source code, and in that window, the "smart quotes" read correctly, as they would in Word, say. I see the page is generated in Front Page, but nothing else suggests problems ... at least to someone aware of precious little more than the most basic HTML.

Guess I'll have to live with this -- till the program's updated to be smarter or more intuitive?

Thanks for the reply,
Mike

Comment 3

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8

Looks normal here. In Tools -> Options -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced I have selected: Western (ISO-8859-1). You could try renaming the file prefs.js in your profile and see if it still happens, or try a new profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Prefs.js_file
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager#Creating_a_new_profile

Comment 4

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This is a mass search for bugs that are in the Firefox General component, are UNCO, and have not been changed for 1000 days and have an unspecified version. 

Reporter, can you please update to Firefox 3.6.10, create a fresh profile, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/managing+profiles, and test again. If you still see the bug, please update this bug. If the issue is gone, please set the resolution to RESOLVED > WORKSFORME.

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

No reply from reporter, INCOMPLETE. Please retest with Firefox 3.6.12 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.