Firefox graphics glitch?

December 14, 2014 1:08 PM

There are odd characters appearing on top of my Firefox window at the active tabs. Is this just a harmless glitch?

At the sides of the active tab at the top of the Firefox window, two Chinese characters and a carriage return symbol (↵) appear, transposed over the sides of the tab and overlapping onto the inactive tab. The ↵ also appears between the bookmark star and bookmarks menu symbol to the right of the search bar, but as soon as the mouse hovers over it, it disappears.

I'm assuming this is some kind of harmless glitch, possibly related to memory problems. Should I worry about it? Google does not bring up results mentioning the issue.

(I apologize for not having a screenshot, but I cannot get that to work for some reason, possibly just related to Paint being terrible.)

posted by Countess Elena to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

If you've scanned your machine for viruses and malware and it's come back clean, I'd assume it's a harmless glitch as long as you're not having any other problems. I've personally found that Firefox on Windows has been... problematic of late, to say the least. I've had similar (but not identical) issues as well that fix themselves almost as soon as they crop up and my system is running fine otherwise. So, I wouldn't be worried, but I am considering moving over to another browser if the issues keep piling up.
posted by peteyjlawson at 1:49 PM on December 14, 2014

Best answer: According to answers at the Firefox support site, it's caused by a buggy McAfee Site Advisor extension. Disabling the extension should fix it.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:03 PM on December 14, 2014

Response by poster: Funny thing -- I left for a while, came back, and it's gone. Huh.

I'll remember that about the McAfee, though. Thanks!
posted by Countess Elena at 2:51 PM on December 14, 2014

Any sentence containing the words "buggy" and "McAfee" is pretty much a tautology in my experience.
posted by flabdablet at 6:26 AM on December 15, 2014 [1 favorite]