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Websites show up as weird symbols and letters.

  • 2 replies
  • 7 have this problem
  • 23 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

adam.lerch
adam.lerch

I've been having this problem for a few months now. Whenever I go on certain websites, Facebook is one of them, I get a series of random characters, numbers and letters. I have already seen an archived post about this, but I tried everything. I deleted my cookies, cleared my cache, checked the about:config for any bold network.http entries and found none, and even went as far as reinstalling Firefox, which didn't help. Is there a solution to the problem, or is it something with my computer?

I've been having this problem for a few months now. Whenever I go on certain websites, Facebook is one of them, I get a series of random characters, numbers and letters. I have already seen an archived post about this, but I tried everything. I deleted my cookies, cleared my cache, checked the about:config for any bold network.http entries and found none, and even went as far as reinstalling Firefox, which didn't help. Is there a solution to the problem, or is it something with my computer?

Chosen solution

Firefox 44+ accepts a new kind of encoding (compression) called Brotli (br) for secure connections. Websites like Facebook and YouTube have enabled Brotli (br) encoding for files send via a secure connection. Some (security) software that intercepts a secure connection to scan the content doesn't know about this encoding and changes the content-type header to text/plain. A possible workaround is to modify the involved pref and remove the trailing ", br" to prevent the server from sending files with Brotli compression.

  • network.http.accept-encoding.secure = "gzip, deflate, br" => "gzip, deflate" (without quotes)

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.

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All Replies (2)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor

Some security filtering software can cause this problem with HTTPS sites that use the latest compression methods. In recent months, the culprit has been "Web Companion" from Lavasoft. Do you have that program?

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator

Chosen Solution

Firefox 44+ accepts a new kind of encoding (compression) called Brotli (br) for secure connections. Websites like Facebook and YouTube have enabled Brotli (br) encoding for files send via a secure connection. Some (security) software that intercepts a secure connection to scan the content doesn't know about this encoding and changes the content-type header to text/plain. A possible workaround is to modify the involved pref and remove the trailing ", br" to prevent the server from sending files with Brotli compression.

  • network.http.accept-encoding.secure = "gzip, deflate, br" => "gzip, deflate" (without quotes)

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I'll be careful" to continue.