Background
Recently upgraded a system to Ubuntu 10.04 and started noticing these strange characters when I’d hit Google.
If you see something like this it usually has something to do with your computer’s locale (language) not being set correctly. That’s exactly what was wrong in my case with Firefox on Ubuntu 10.04. Not sure if it’s a wide problem, but I have had 2 systems where I’ve upgraded them both to Ubuntu 10.04 recently and they’ve both had this problem.
You can further confirm this by checking what the language is set to in Firefox. Navigate the pull down menus like so, Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> “Choose…” (under Languages).
Clicking the Choose button will open the Language’s Dialog box.
If you see the value: chrome://global/locale/intl.properties for your language then you’re most likely experiencing this same problem.
Solution
The workaround/fix? It’s pretty easy. In Firefox’s URL bar, type the URL about:config.
Then in the filter, type: intl.access_language.
Right click on intl.access_languages and select Reset from the pop up menu.
Doing this should allow your locale from your operating system to now get picked up by Firefox. If it’s working correctly you should now see en-us,en.
You can again further confirm it’s working by going back to the Language dialog box and making sure that your language is showing up correctly there too.