Do you have problems with some websites that you want to turn on the encoding auto-detect?
Can you post a link to a public page that causes problems in that case?

That is usually not needed, but a first to try is usually the Universal setting in the Auto-Detect menu (*Firefox > Web Developer > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect: Universal).

Thank you cor-el for your reply. It appears that Firefox 9.0.1 *is* auto-detecting with the setting marked "off" but it is a bit confusing. I only noticed this option because I have been recently trying to make many of my websites "standards compliant" and noticed that googles chrome has the same setting of auto-detect marked "on" and Firefox auto-detects with the setting marked "off." So the problem is not really that Firefox isn't auto-detecting, it is that it would seem to me that in the menu that setting should be marked "on" instead of "off." Make sense?

So I guess this is really a non-issue practically, more of an issue why Firefox would have the box ticked "off" when it is really "on."

Thanks again, Axis

Firefox doesn't do any auto-detecting.
Firefox uses by default the encoding as send by the web server, so check out with which encoding the web server the file sends if there are problems.
Firefox uses only other means like a meta tag or maybe a byte order mark to determine which encoding to use encoding if the server doesn't send an encoding.

You can use the Live Http Headers extension.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/

Hi cor-el--

What you write above "Firefox uses by default the encoding as send by the web server, so check out with which encoding the web server the file sends if there are problems. Firefox uses only other means like a meta tag or maybe a byte order mark to determine which encoding to use encoding if the server doesn't send an encoding" sounds exactly like what auto-detecting is.

I won't beat a dead horse any longer but if using the default encoding as sent by the webserver isn't auto-detecting then I don't know what is.

Regards, Axis

Auto-Detecting is usually associated with a specific 8 bit ISO-8859-xx or Windows encoding if the default Western ISO-8859-1 isn't used.
It is best to switch to UTF-8encoding fr all files to avoid any encoding problems and configure web servers accordingly.