What are these black diamonds?

August 8, 2004 9:49 AM

I'm on a fresh install of Firefox 0.9.3 and I'm frequently getting a line of black diamonds with white question marks inside of them when I load a page. Sometimes it just flashes and goes away and the page loads; other times, the page isn't loading at all. I've checked my settings and Googled it but can't figure out what this is. Been using Firefox for some time now and never seen this prior to this install. Any ideas?
posted by rushmc to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I think it has to do something with what character encoding the site has. I've seen it before (and im on 0.8) on some sites.
posted by rhapsodie at 10:36 AM on August 8, 2004

Yep. Encoding issues.

If memory serves me right, it happens when you enforce the encoding to be read as "Unicode" on a non-unicode page.

Usually setting your encoding ("View" -> "Character Encoding") to "Western (ISO-8859-1)" will solve the problem.
posted by kchristidis at 8:46 PM on August 8, 2004

Okay, that must be it, as I recently changed the encoding to Unicode. So I guess I'm stuck seeing garbage instead of international characters, eh? What, exactly, makes a page "non-Unicode compliant"?
posted by rushmc at 8:56 PM on August 8, 2004