452740 - strange characters displayed when viewing most web pages

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[luke]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1

After running firefox 2 without problems on my ubuntu 7.04 laptop, I thought I'd give beta version 3 a go, but on most web pages strange characters are displayed (seemingly at random places) instead of English text, I have since upgraded to ubuntu 8.0.4 which included firefox 3.0.1 and I have the same problem. Opera and Konquerer on the same laptop run ok, as did firefox 2, firefox 3.0.1 on windows on the same laptop does not produce the same problem either.

Reproducible: Always




I have a screenshot, but no way to upload it?

Comment 1

[luke]

Attachment: screen shot of the bugzilla web site with strange characters

Comment 2

[cmtalbert]

This doesn't appear to be security sensitive.  

A few questions...

Did this start happening before the bugzilla upgrade last night?

Are your language settings in Firefox (Edit->Preferences dialog, Content tab, click "choose languages button") set to default to English and not Greek?

Can you try this in safe mode (or with a new profile) to rule out the possibility that it is an extension or plugin causing the issue?

Thanks!

Comment 3

[luke]

Hi,

Sorry Clint you are correct - it's not security sensitive at all, I mistakenly reported this problem whilst using firefox 3, and couldn't actually read the tick box related security, but assumed it was something to do with hiding email addresses, so I ticked it like a fool!

This started happening 1 week or so ago when I thought I'd give the 3 beta version a try, and continued when I upgraded to full 3.0.1 release last night.

The default language within content tab is set to English/United Kingdom [en-GB]
English/United States and English are also listed there.

Running firefox in safe mode exhibits the same behaviour.

However, running firefox with a new profile removes the issue... I can start with a new profile although it would be nice to know what caused this, some corruption in the profile?

Comment 4

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Some setting or corruption that safe-mode doesn't reset/ignore? that seems like it would narrow the possibilities a lot, but I don't have any good ideas for what it could be. Don't trash your old profile, it would indeed be nice to know.

The safe-mode dialog has an option to reset all your prefs, but I don't think it does that by default. The first thing I'd check is go to about:config and click on the "status" column and browse through the "user set" prefs for anything odd looking. Try filtering on "font" and "char" in particular.

Comment 5

[luke]

Excellent work, indeed there was a user defined setting (although I certainly did not define it myself!) 

This was set:

font.name.serif.x-western;Standard Symbols L

instead of:

font.name.serif.x-western;serif

Once it was changed the strange characters - or should I say symbols? disappeared.

Many thanks,

Luke

Comment 6

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

I guess you have no idea how that user defined setting got into that state?
Perhaps you used extensions or something?

Comment 7

[luke]

The only about:config changes I remember making were related to NTLM, so I'm really not sure how that could have happened