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Why do Firefox and Chrome render "ಠ_ಠ" (U+0CA0) differently, even if I set both on UTF-8?

The character in question is ಠ (U+0CA0; ಠ). Here are three screenshots:

Chrome 17 for Mac

GC 17 Mac

Firefox 7 for Mac

FF 7 Mac

Firefox > 4 for Windows

FF 4 Win

All browsers I tried had UTF-8 as encoding. Here it is copy-pasted : ಠ_ಠ, but I have no idea how you are seeing it.

Solution

  • This is probably due to the different platforms and browsers having different default fonts and font implementations.

    The font-family on SO is: 

    Arial,Liberation Sans,DejaVu Sans,sans-serif

    So different fonts will apply on different platforms.

    In your Mac examples, the different browsers display a "missing" glyph differently - Chrome with a simple square, FF with the hex Unicode of the missing glyph rendered within the box (in this case 0CA0).