I am using Firefox Portable version 3.6.16. Everywhere that I should see three periods, i.e. "...", I am seeing a black vertical bar. For example, here is what my tabs look like: http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/5389060/640/5389060.jpg
Text on the buttons under Tools->Options also exhibits this behavior. Anyone have an idea what it could be? Running Windows XP SP3.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'd wager it's a font issue. It's not 3 periods, it's an ellipses, which is a single character. But if you have the default font for titlebars (I think that's what FF uses for tabs as well, but I could be wrong) set to one that doesn't have an ellipses there, you wind up with the black box which corresponds with an unknown character.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
The default was set to "Times New Roman". I changed to a couple different fonts and restarted Firefox, but no luck. The ellipses don't want to cooperate.
Not that I know what an ellipsis is, I tried to google but can't seem to find this exact issue. If I click "Advanced" next to Default Font, a lot of other types of font settings appear. E.g., Proportional, Monospace, Default character encoding, etc. I tried to play around with those, but not sure what the Default character encoding is about.
Any hints on how to troubleshoot?
I was referring to fonts set in Windows (not in Firefox). The fonts used for the titlebar at the top are part of the Windows theme and Firefox uses either that or the 'menu' font for that. You can't change it in Firefox itself. Try switching to a standard Windows XP theme to see if it fixes it. If it does, then it's an issue with the theme setting in XP interacting with Firefox.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
All right, I'll look into that. Thanks. I also found this thread about SeaMonkey that might help me: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=1597265
John, you were very correct. Here is a detailed explanation:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA47715?viewlocale=en_US
Somehow my Message Box font was set to MS Sans Serif. This is not an upgrade installation so I have no idea how that happened. Regardless, thanks for your help tracking down this issue.