We've lost another freedom, choosing the default character set encoding
in Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers.
I only recently noticed that Firefox has banned UTF-8 as a default
character set encoding about four years ago.
Chrome followed suit this year.
(By banning, I mean you cannot set it as the default, not via the UI,
or by directly editing the user preferences: the setting is disallowed
in the sources. The only way to remove the ban is to recompile the
browsers from sources, applying a patch that removes the ban.)
This affects those web pages that do not declare a specific character
set, like many mailing list archives; and local plain text files.
(list.gnu.org provides a Content-Type header with charset=UTF-8,
which I do warmly commend the list admin! -- but for example
marc.info does not.)
Both Chrome and Firefox developers insist that the *proper* default
character set is none other than Windows-1252, or some other
encoding (other than UTF-8) for non-Western users.
The system locale used by the user is ignored in all cases.
The underlying logic for these developers, as far as I could
ascertain from the bug reports and changelogs, was that
only "legacy" charsets should be selectable as a default,
and UTF-8 is the (only) non-legacy character set encoding.
In my opinion, that is a non-sequitur: those settings have
nothing to do with "legacy", and everything to do with "default".
I tried to raise this question with the developers involved
(particularly Henri Sivonen for Firefox), but I was blocked;
apparently these issues are already covered in the relevant
bugzillas (marked WONTFIX).
(Also, particularly Sivonen, likes to claim that choosing
UTF-8 as the character set encoding if no encoding is specified
is "unreasonable". On systems like GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd, or
even BSD variants, there often are no "legacy" content without
character set definition, other than in UTF-8 -- this is particularly
true in my case, including the servers I maintain --, so
"unreasonable" seems to me be a disguise for something else.)
I was wondering whether this kind of removal of user choice
is something the LibrePlanet folks could help with?
I suspect publicity is the best disinfectant against such encroachment.
Best regards,
Nominal Animal
(I use a pseudonym in order to handle criticism better, as
everything directed to "Nominal Animal" is directed at my
expression/advice/opinions, not at my "social person".
My physical identity is not a secret, and I can provide it
if needed, but as mentioned, I function better under this
pseudonym.)
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