Choosing UTF-8 character encoding

Question

Level 2

334 points

Choosing UTF-8 character encoding

I have been having problems in the last couple of weeks resulting in page hangs, Force Quits, Restarts, and I have no idea what has been the cause. I have updated Flash and Java and Mac. Doubleclick/eBay javascript files have been appearing on my desktop for unknown reasons. In desperation, I decided to change Encoding in Safari to Unicode UTF-8 and because of this, or coincidentally, the problems seem to be in abeyance. Cause or coincidence? Can anyone throw any illumination my way?

By the way, I tend to use Defaults as much as possible as I don't know what my meddling would do.

I know that Unicode is an important choice developers must consider when writing pages but is it a good choice for end-users like me? Does choosing it in Preferences make web pages behave differently in Safari?

MacBook, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), Safari 9.1.1 (10601.6.17)

Posted on Jun 28, 2016 2:42 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,210 points

Jun 28, 2016 3:11 AM in response to Ewan Lamont

These days just about every web page should have code in it which tells all browsers to switch to utf-8 or another encoding automatically. Th browser default settings only have any effect when the web page author has erroneously forgotten to include any charset= statement in his code. So normally it would not matter. But if it helps with the pages you are viewing, by all means use it.

Another possibility is when a page is on a misconfigured server which tells the browser to use a different charset, like Latin 1, when the page is labeled utf8. Hopefully that should also be very rare these days.

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Answer 2

Ewan Lamont Author

Level 2

334 points

Jun 28, 2016 4:08 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

That problems seem to have stopped for now might be a coincidence, but the choice of browser encoding does not seem to have given rise to any obvious new problems. This means it is OK to leave it because there are some sites where it might reduce problems.

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