Si Dawson . Com

Firefox 3.5.5 screwy characters appearing

There’s something that’s bugged me ever since I upgraded to Firefox 3. Certain pages that used to work perfectly in Firefox 2 suddenly didn’t.

Instead there would be a mess on the page – lots of square boxes the size of characters with text inside them. Like this or maybe this

Typically this would be some kind of character encoding issue ( the server/browser specifying/requesting UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 etc), or having Auto-Detect universal set off in Firefox – and most sites around the net propose this as a solution (oh, & also recommend partial reinstalls of your O/S).

Uhh, no.

It’s actually a compression issue.

If you’re having this problem, the resolution is this:

Enter into the address bar

about:config

in the Filter textbox below, type

network.http.accept-encoding

You can also just start typing “accept-encoding” until it appears on the screen.

Double click the network.http.accept-encoding entry.

Now, on my browser, it was set to

gzip,deflate;q=0.9,compress;q=0.7

but should have been

gzip,deflate

So, type that into the box & hit OK, then restart your browser (just make sure you close all your windows too)

Voila, you can now surf the web without having to constantly switch back to IE.