When a website breaks because 3rd party cookies go way of dodo or the page relies on ActiveX, shoudl Firefox provide an option to run it?
I understand that some people have different opinion, but any page past 2005 should have encoding in order and older sites should fix their sites.
> older sites should fix their sites.
A lot of the reason they are considered “older sites” in the first place is because they are not heavily maintained. The thing to remember about the web is this: not all websites are “software” that is maintained. Some of them are static works similar to a movie, with static content.
> The single-byte Latin scripts are semi legible, so that is enough for me.
Did you see the example that I gave of Polish text? I am sorry, but if you feel like reading multiple paragraphs this way is bearable, then we will just be stuck in disagreement.
I did see the text. If it bothered me that much, I would write a proxy that passed HTML through iconv tool before serving it to user (with a dictionary to remember setting for each site).
But more likely, I would stop visiting such site or complain to the owner. Situation doesn't get better by covering up errors.
If there's more elaborate UI surface in order to address Latin-script cases where autodetection fails (I estimate 1% failure rate for Polish), it risks getting the whole thing removed completely even for Japanese users (as happened with the hamburger menu entry point in Firefox when the hamburger menu was rewritten, as happened in Chrome previously, and as happened with Safari for iOS in the sense of the menu never making it to iOS).