Foreign language plugin help for Firefox

I can't get Firefox to show Japanese characters...

I've looked in their ad-ons and they're all translation type tools which is not what I need. I just need to be able to view hiragana/katakana/kanji.

Anyone know the easy way to make it happen?

It should just work.



Try going to View > Character Encoding and select Unicode (UTF- if it's not already. Dont be sold the dummy by the various language options, including the obvious Japanese option.

Just tried on a default install of FF and it worked there too.

Yeah.. I though that would work too kris - but it doesn't... it just does this as usual:


It only recognises one character - not much of an improvement.

Is there some special pack I need to download/install before selecting 'Unicode' to make it work? OR, is there some setting I need to flick elsewhere?

google.co.jp works fine for me too.

does it work in ie or something else?

ie is it an os issue?

Who knows?.. I'm on XP. Doubt that would make any diff.

Same issue using IE actually too.

XP doesn't display foreign characters by default. It will prompt you to install a language pack the first time you view a page with foreign characters on it. It could be that you've chosen not to at some point and it doesn't prompt anymore?

http://www.google.com/search?q=japanese%20language%20pack%20windows%20xp

Legend. Fixed at last. Thankfully I remembered where my install disc was as it was needed.

Cheers for that.