439730 - Characters like ellipses render fine within webpages, but don't render when part of browser.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Scott Zingale]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

Characters, including an ellipsis, sigma, tilde, all the letters of the greek alphabet, the trademark symbol, and pretty much every character after and including ℑ won't render when used in part of the browser, ie., the tabs (with the exception of sigma), the Page Name bar, the interface (including the menus). However, all of said characters render correctly as part of a web page.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.For me, find a page with one of these characters in the title
2.Go to said page
3.Voila
Actual Results:  
Vertical black bar appeared in place of the character.

Expected Results:  
Character should have been displayed correctly.

Comment 1

[Scott Zingale]

Attachment: Screenshot of rendering problem with arrows pointing out glitches

Comment 2

[Kai Liu]

Your system font is set to one that does not support the ellipses character.  MS Sans Serif is a very old font.

Comment 4

[Kai Liu]

BTW, if you want a font that looks like MS Sans Serif but that is not an ancient bitmap font that is missing many symbols, you should use Microsoft Sans Serif instead, which is the updated version of MS Sans Serif.  Microsoft Sans Serif is a standard part of Windows XP and Vista (and probably 2000 too, though I haven't checked).

Comment 7

[Ian Graham]

I wonder why was this not an issue with FF 2.0.x?  Does FF 2.0 not use the system font setting?  

Perhaps the FF 3.x installer could do a quick test of the fonts being used as the system font, and warn the user that they will want to change this. That would be a Nice Thing for the user, IMO :) 

Comment 8

[Kai Liu]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I wonder why was this not an issue with FF 2.0.x?  Does FF 2.0 not use the
> system font setting?  
> 
I think Firefox 2 used three periods instead of an ellipses character.

> Perhaps the FF 3.x installer could do a quick test of the fonts being used as
> the system font, and warn the user that they will want to change this. That
> would be a Nice Thing for the user, IMO :) 
> 
Not too many people run into this, especially since all of the operating system's built-in classic themes that do use the font are using the newer "Microsoft" variant instead of the older "MS" variant.  I'm not sure if the benefit would be worth the added code complexity.  There is some related discussion about this in bug 437224.