Unicode and HTML - Web Browser Support

Web Browser Support

Many browsers are only capable of displaying a small subset of the full Unicode repertoire. Here is how your browser displays various Unicode code points:

Some web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (from version 7 on), are able to display multilingual web pages by intelligently choosing a font to display each individual character on the page. They will correctly display any mix of Unicode blocks, as long as appropriate fonts are present in the operating system.

Older browsers, such as Netscape Navigator 4.77 and Internet Explorer 6, can only display text supported by the current font associated with the character encoding of the page, and may misinterpret numeric character references as being references to code values within the current character encoding, rather than references to Unicode code points. When you are using such a browser, it is unlikely that your computer has all of those fonts, or that the browser can use all available fonts on the same page. As a result, the browser will not display the text in the examples above correctly, though it may display a subset of them. Because they are encoded according to the standard, though, they will display correctly on any system that is compliant and does have the characters available. Further, those characters given names for use in named entity references are likely to be more commonly available than others.

For displaying characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, like the Gothic letter faihu, which is variant of runic letter Fehu in the table above, some systems (like Windows 2000) need manual adjustments of their settings.