websites text displays as weird symbols
all of a sudden, on every webpage i open in firefox on this computer (synced firefox browsers on other computers work normally, as does chrome on this machine) all text displays as symbols, such as in the attached picture.
All Replies (14)
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Thank you!
What's your computer system and Firefox version?
This could be a problem with fonts.
Type about:preferences#content<enter> in the address bar. Across from fonts and colors, press the Advanced button. On the bottom, turn on Allow Web Sites To Choose Their Own.
Fonts Information - Detected via Flash http://browserspy.dk/fonts-flash.php?detail=1
Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache.
- Clear the Cache and
- Remove Cookies
Warning ! ! This will log you out of sites you're logged in to. You may also lose any settings for that website.
Type about:preferences<enter> in the address bar.
- Cookies; Select Privacy. Under History, select
Firefox will Use Custom Settings. Press the button on the right side called Show Cookies. Use the search bar to look for the site. Note; There may be more than one entry. Remove All of them.
- Cache; Select Advanced > Network. Across from
Cached Web Content, Press Clear Now.
If there is still a problem, Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). While you are in safe mode;
Try disabling graphics hardware acceleration in Firefox. Since this feature was added to Firefox it has gradually improved but there are still a few glitches.
You will need to restart Firefox for this to take effect so save all work first (e.g., mail you are composing, online documents you're editing, etc.,) and then perform these steps:
In Firefox 54 and below:
- Click the menu button
and select Options (Windows) or Preferences (Mac, Linux).
- Select the Advanced panel and the General tab.
- Uncheck Use hardware acceleration when available.
- Close Firefox completely and then restart Firefox to see if the problem persists.
In Firefox 55 and above:
- Click the menu button and select Options (Windows) or Preferences (Mac, Linux).
- Select the General panel.
- Under Performance, uncheck Use recommended performance settings. Additional settings will be displayed.
- Uncheck Use hardware acceleration when available.
- Close Firefox completely and then restart Firefox to see if the problem persists.
Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!
If the problem is resolved, you should check for updates for your graphics driver by following the steps mentioned in these Knowledge base articles:
Websites like Google and Facebook and YouTube have enabled Brotli (br) encoding for files send via a secure connection. Some (security) software intercepts a secure connection and acts like a man-in-the-middle to scan content and may not recognize this encoding and changes the content-type header to text/plain. This causes Firefox to display compressed content as gibberish instead of rendering the decompressed content. You can check the issuer of the certificate to see what software is interfering with the connection and places itself as a "man-in-the-middle" between Firefox and the web server. Make sure to have the latest updates of this software and possibly contact them for support.
You can check information for the domain in the currently selected tab via these steps:
- click the Control Center 'i' icon at the left end of the location/address bar
- click the arrow to expand the security message
- click "More Information" to open "Tools -> Page Info"
- click "Security" to inspect and modify cookies and passwords and inspect the certificate chain in a standalone window
- click "Permissions" to inspect and modify permissions
no idea why this failed to post with my original posting, sorry
See also:
- firefox 57 (ubuntu 16.04) not rendering text of some webpages
- Firefox 57 won't load text on some pages (Ubuntu 16.04)
Absolutely nothing about secure connections has changed and there is no sign of any problem. It only started happening after the update. Previous Firefox was fine. Waterfox is fine. Chrome is fine. Gnome Web Browser is fine.
ONLY Firefox 57 has this problem.
Athraithe ag Moilleadóir ar
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} by holding down the <Shift> (Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
Hi face2face11, those little squares with two rows of two characters are Firefox's way to show that a requested character is missing from the font being used. I thought Google used Arial, so that's hard to explain. Could you inspect that?
- right-click the problem text and choose Inspect Element, a panel should open in the lower part of the tab
- on the right side of the panel is a section with headings like Rules, Computed, Layout... toward the right end, click Fonts (you may need to click a little triangle to access it)
What does that panel show is being used for the problem text?
Hi seanos, I'm not sure what article or thread you meant to link to?
On Linux, Firefox 57 ratcheted up the security sandbox, limiting which files pages can use on your system. This apparently prevents Firefox from using font files outside of specified directories.
As a temporary workaround, you can reduce the sandbox level back to what it was in Firefox 52-56 as follows:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Return. Click the button accepting the risk.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sand and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the security.sandbox.content.level preference and change the value from 3 to 1 and click OK
That change won't take effect until the next time you quit and restart Firefox.
Does that work on your Firefox?
I don't know what's going to happen with this issue; there are security concerns about allowing binary files from untrusted locations in the sandbox.
jscher2000 said
Hi seanos, I'm not sure what article or thread you meant to link to?
Silly me I just followed the support forum dialog for adding a link which suggests you insert the name of the article. I suppose they mean support article, because linking to other questions/answers would be too useful.
firefox 57 (ubuntu 16.04) not rendering text of some webpages
jscher2000 said
On Linux, Firefox 57 ratcheted up the security sandbox, limiting which files pages can use on your system. This apparently prevents Firefox from using font files outside of specified directories.
Security/Sandbox - MozillaWiki
Level 3…
- Read access to most of the filesystem
- Excludes themes/GTK configuration, fonts, shared data and libraries
It seems inconceivable that a program designed to display text could exclude standard font directories (and the wiki suggests it doesn’t) but I will try reducing the sandbox level.
In your reply to face2face11 you asked about fonts. The fonts Google search is failing to display in FF57 are ArialMT & friends.
Having looked at the fonts I now see some security warnings I didn’t see before, but there are other non-rendered pages with no security warnings/
Content Security Policy: Ag déanamh neamhaird ar ‘x-frame-options’ de bharr na treorach ‘frame-ancestors’. Content Security Policy: Neamhshuim ar “'unsafe-inline'” laistigh de script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ i bhfeidhm Content Security Policy: Neamhshuim ar “https:” laistigh de script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ i bhfeidhm Content Security Policy: Neamhshuim ar “http:” laistigh de script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ i bhfeidhm Content Security Policy: Cuireadh bac ar acmhainn ag self mar gheall ar shocruithe an leathanaigh (“script-src 'nonce-aPr4onCc135EgR4fsZQQvEwo0L4' https://notifications.google.com 'unsafe-eval' https://apis.google.com https://ssl.gstatic.com https://www.google.com https://www.gstatic.com”). Source: (function(a,p,g,C){var c={safeWindow:{},.... widget:1 Content Security Policy: Cuireadh bac ar acmhainn ag self mar gheall ar shocruithe an leathanaigh (“script-src 'nonce-aPr4onCc135EgR4fsZQQvEwo0L4' https://notifications.google.com 'unsafe-eval' https://apis.google.com https://ssl.gstatic.com https://www.google.com https://www.gstatic.com”). Source: (function injected(eventName, injectedIn.... widget:1
Translation
[WARNINGS] Content Security Policy: Ignoring ‘x-frame-options’ because of setting? ‘frame-ancestors’. Content Security Policy: Ignoring “'unsafe-inline'” within active script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ Content Security Policy: Ignoring “https:” within active script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ Content Security Policy: Ignoring “http:” within active script-src: ‘strict-dynamic’ [ERRORS] Content Security Policy: Blocked capacity of self according to page settings (“script-src 'nonce-aPr4onCc135EgR4fsZQQvEwo0L4' https://notifications.google.com 'unsafe-eval' https://apis.google.com https://ssl.gstatic.com https://www.google.com https://www.gstatic.com”). Source: (function(a,p,g,C){var c={safeWindow:{},.... widget:1 Content Security Policy: Blocked capacity of self according to page settings (“script-src 'nonce-aPr4onCc135EgR4fsZQQvEwo0L4' https://notifications.google.com 'unsafe-eval' https://apis.google.com https://ssl.gstatic.com https://www.google.com https://www.gstatic.com”). Source: (function injected(eventName, injectedIn.... widget:1
Changing the sandbox level (to 2) fixed the problem, but reveals that Mozilla have no idea what they’re doing. What kind of mind would advocate a change that will break your program on every Linux system?
I’d appreciate a proper explanation of exactly what sandbox level 3 is doing, if anyone can offer one. It’s not at all clear.
ArialMT is not installed on my system, so is Firefox blocking Google downloading its own fonts? That would be very weird.
Another site uses Verdana, which is installed on my system but is installed as a system package in /usr/share/fonts. What possible security advantage could there be in blocking system fonts (apart from not displaying anything at all)?
Athraithe ag Moilleadóir ar
seanos said
What kind of mind would advocate a change that will break your program on every Linux system?
Oh, please. A lot of developers and testers use Linux. But how many store fonts outside of standard folders (e.g., /usr/share, /usr/local/share, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, /etc/fonts or ~/.fonts) and configure fontconfig to see those fonts?
The problem was filed in the bug tracking system near the end of October by a user who discovered blank areas for the "Lucida Sans Typewriter" font. The developers quickly realized this could be a larger problem, but it was somewhat late in the beta cycle to be fixed in Firefox 57. The general approach for the solution was decided around 12 days before release, and further time was required to build all the bits and pieces, test, fix the broken patch, test again, etc.
The fix has been confirmed as of 6 days ago, and is in Firefox 59 (available to early testers as Nightly). It will likely be added to Firefox 58 in a couple weeks (available to testers as Beta). It might not be part of a point release for Firefox 57 depending on the risk of breaking other things; the people working on it will decide on that.
jscher2000 said
Oh, please. A lot of developers and testers use Linux. But how many store fonts outside of standard folders (e.g., /usr/share, /usr/local/share, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, /etc/fonts or ~/.fonts) and configure fontconfig to see those fonts?
My point is that I don’t do this and presumably neither does face2face11 but we both had this problem. That suggests it’s not confined to a few weirdo users.
jscher2000 said
Hi face2face11, those little squares with two rows of two characters are Firefox's way to show that a requested character is missing from the font being used. I thought Google used Arial, so that's hard to explain. Could you inspect that?What does that panel show is being used for the problem text?
- right-click the problem text and choose Inspect Element, a panel should open in the lower part of the tab
- on the right side of the panel is a section with headings like Rules, Computed, Layout... toward the right end, click Fonts (you may need to click a little triangle to access it)
sorry, haven't been able to get back to this machine until now (out of town) the font being used is apparently EmojiOne Mozilla system
If locally installed fonts aren't working then this is possibly a sandbox security issue.
You can set this pref to 2 or 1 on the about:config page to lower the sandbox security setting.
- security.sandbox.content.level = 1
- close and restart Firefox to make the change effective.
If '1' still doesn't have effect then try '0' to disable the sandbox.
If this didn't work then undo/reverse the change and reset the pref via the right-click context menu to the default value.
You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.
jscher2000 said
… will likely be added to Firefox 58 …
Mozilla bug 1412090 - Some Fonts Display as Blank due to content-process sandbox:
> VERIFIED FIXED in Firefox 58