Those symbols mean that the computer does not know how to display a character. Check your language settings. Check that the web page is on the correct language.

My computer's language is set to English/US. firefox has English [en] and English/Unisted states [en-us]

And what about the web site? BTW, try this; when you get those strange characters again, highlight and copy them. Then open an text-edit program like Word, and paste it in.

github doesn't specify a language. but other websites that show the problem specify en-us. Github is html5 in case that helps. Firefox won't let me select those characters. It just selects around them. Other browsers draw a rss icon shape instead for example.

Hmmmmmmmm. Can you post a screen shot here?

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Thank you!

first image is how firefox is now rendering the shapes or characters. second image is how it should render them.

Those tall rectangles with two rows of two characters indicate a particular character that Firefox did not find in the font it is using. Often this is because Firefox is substituting or falling back to a generic font because the font specified by the site isn't available.

In the case of icons, the most common scenario is that a downloadable font is blocked. Github uses the "octicons" font (at least when I visit): https://github.global.ssl.fastly.net/assets/octicons-bccfe7abf7461ed10568dd044425080f7de09889.woff

If you use the NoScript extension, offsite fonts may require their own exception to load.

If you do not have any extensions that could be filtering the font, check the general setting:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste gfx and pause while the list is filtered

(3) If the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled preference is bolded and "user set" to false, double-click it to restore it to its default value of true.

Any luck?

Actually, it's simpler. You are overriding the page fonts in the Preferences dialog.

Edit menu > Preferences > Content

In the Fonts & Colors section, click Advanced

Check the box for "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" and OK out. Reload, and the icons should appear.

Those are called Octicons in this case and are a custom font that is downloaded via an @font-face CSS rule.

• https://github.com/styleguide/css/7.0

Also make sure that you allow pages to choose their own fonts.

• Tools > Options > Content : Fonts & Colors > Advanced: [X] "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above"

scher2000, thank you very much :) that fixed it. Enabling "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" did it :) thanks again.

Okay, your talking about that circle with the horizontal line going thru it next to that broken T, right? I can't tell from a picture of the web page, but it looks to me like a picture that was not loaded properly. Try this, go to the page and right click on the picture. Does it offer choices like open new window, tab, copy link? If it does, then the picture is being blocked. Copy the web address of the picture and post it.