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Why does Gmail help not work on Firefox?

  • 11 replies
  • 6 have this problem
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  • Last reply by cor-el

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When using Firefox now I cant see Gmail help any more. Everything looks like scrambled. When I use Google Chrome instead everything works fine.

I got alerted to that issue and to find out what is going on when a friend sent me an e-mail I could not read because it was written on Chrome. So, when I use Chrome to read my friend's email everything is fine. if I use Firefox it doesnt.

Is there any plugin that makes Firefox compatible with Gmail help?

When using Firefox now I cant see Gmail help any more. Everything looks like scrambled. When I use Google Chrome instead everything works fine. I got alerted to that issue and to find out what is going on when a friend sent me an e-mail I could not read because it was written on Chrome. So, when I use Chrome to read my friend's email everything is fine. if I use Firefox it doesnt. Is there any plugin that makes Firefox compatible with Gmail help?

Chosen solution

You're welcome.

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All Replies (11)

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Can you attach a screenshot?

Use a compressed image type like PNG or JPG to save the screenshot.

Is the page zoomed somehow or do you see boxes with the hex code instead of the real characters?

Reset the page zoom on pages that cause problems.

  • View > Zoom > Reset (Ctrl+0 (zero); Command+0 on Mac)

You can also check the encoding.

  • Firefox > Web Developer > Character Encoding
  • View > Character Encoding
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Hi Cor-el,

for screen shots I use ScreenHUnter 6

In the meantime I found out:

It has nothing to do with character encoding It has to do with the character set Firefox and IE are not recognizing but Chrome has no problems with it. HOw can I find out the character set that was used for the scrambled text?? It might be used as standard by Chrome only?

Attached an example, the e-mail I received and a help text

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Try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

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Thanks Cor-el,

tried it and it didnt do anything.

I think its the character set Firefox cant handle.

When I: FORWARD,... select the garbled text and change the character-set the real text becomes visible.

So, it must be a character set that is incompatible with firefox.

in the latest attached pic I did that, selected some snippets and changed the character set.
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You can use this extension to see which fonts are used in text that is selected (right-click: "Show fonts in selection").

You can do a font test to see if you can identify corrupted font(s).

You can try different default fonts and temporarily disable website fonts to test the selected default font.

  • Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced
  • [ ] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"
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thanks for the nice tip about the add-on. I will try that.


"Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced " I tried that already and it didnt help.

Whats also possible that my friend didnt use a windows system, possibly an apple and that the font is from there. It says sans serif when I select the text but that doesnt mean a lot. I will try the add-on first.

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OK, the font is helveticaneue heavy, it is on my computer but not on the list of Firefox fonts.

I used Notetab, created a text with Helveticaneue as font and pasted that into gmail. The text ended up all garbled. So its Helveticaneue Firefox cant handle.

Modified by eireann.vives

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So, is it a bug that FF doesnt handle helveticaneue well?

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There have been issues before with Helvetica font in Firefox and in that case it were bitmap variants (i.e not vector versions like true type or open type).
Helvetica fonts are default on Mac and that is why they are sometimes specified.
On Windows they are usually not installed or are older versions that may not be supported properly in current Firefox versions.
You can try to uninstall (remove) this font from the fonts folder to see if that makes Firefox use a working font.

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I had Helvetica installed on W7 and still it didnt work. Just deleted the TTF and now it works fine, thanks

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Chosen Solution

You're welcome.