Pale Moon forum

I keep going to "View" > "Character encoding" and setting it to Western, then it goes back to Unicode. (I'm using Linux Mint 17.3.) How do I make the choice stick?

On Windows I use Charset Switcher. It remembers encoding choice per site. Sorry can't check on Linux...

If you need to do this every time to have a readable site, then you should contact the site owners to make sure they indicate the correct page encoding.
The character set menu is only there for debugging/troubleshooting/development purposes and should not (have to) be used on a regular basis by browser users.

Moonchild wrote:If you need to do this every time to have a readable site, then you should contact the site owners to make sure they indicate the correct page encoding.
The character set menu is only there for debugging/troubleshooting/development purposes and should not (have to) be used on a regular basis by browser users.

Did you find a solution? The notion that people at websites will change their sites for me is absurd. There has to be some way in Pale Moon to set Western as the default.

The solution is what I already indicated. Contact the website owners and make sure they send a character encoding (meta) tag with their pages if they want it displayed with the correct code page on every browser. It's not to be changed for "you", it's for everyone! Unicode is the de-facto standard encoding these days, so that is Pale Moon's default for most locales.

You can set the default fallback to Western in Pale Moon's preferences, but that will likely break more sites than it fixes.
You can find it under Preferences -> Content -> "Advanced" under "Fonts & Colors -> Encoding for legacy content. Set that to "Other (including Western)"

For what is worth, specifying the charset with a meta tag is mandatory according to the W3 commitee, so if a website doesn't specify it, it's not standard-compliant and is working only because of the combined power of chance and legacy.