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Comment by DarkShikari | Hacker News Reader

The new "menu in the upper left" seems to be rather badly designed. It's missing the "View" menu entirely, which makes it impossible for me to view non-ASCII/Unicode websites. It took me about 5 minutes of searching and frantically right-clicking to re-enable the old menu, which of course still had the View menu.

On a positive note, 4 is so much faster than 3.6 it isn't even funny. It's like going from a 286 running off of an 8-inch floppy to a Core 2 on an SSD.

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Character encoding options are now in the "Web Developer" sub-menu of the Firefox menu. (Weird, I know.)

UPDATE: This is different in localized builds - Japanese builds of Firefox should provide easier access to the encoding menu. In other locales, you can go to about:config and toggle "browser.menu.showCharacterEncoding" to see this.

You can also press Alt+V to quickly open the old View menu.

This may confuse the few hundred million users whose languages don't use Roman letters and weren't told about this move...

I'm a user of such a language (Arabic) and by now all websites I care about use utf8, so the character encoding is a problem from the past as far as I'm concerned.

I'd be really surprised if there are still sites that don't use utf8.

Japan still uses Shift-JIS for practically everything, much to the chagrin of anyone else in the world looking to use their applications.

I visit some Japanese websites from time to time (not that I can read or anything .. just clicking on links) and don't remember having many problems with weird characters.

This is because this is required if the site uses a legacy character encoding AND it is declared incorrectly or not at all.

IIRC in those locales the Character Encoding menu is under the main Firefox menu.

Tap "Alt" and you get the normal menus (including "View"). Not very obvious, but easy once you know.

This doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu, at least not for me.

type Alt+v then.

You should never need to change the default encoding. If you have to it means the web page you are viewing is broken.

I may be missing something, but character encoding menu is right there when you click Firefox button. 9nth entry from the top for me.

If you don't mind installing an extension, "Personal Menu" will let you add the View menu and its children to the upper-left menu.

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