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Google Chrome, like almost every web browser in recent memory, used to have an option to change the character encoding for the webpage being viewed by going to Menu › Tools › Encoding (or some similar location). This is extraordinarily useful in case the website misrepresents its encoding in its headers, or, failing to do so, Chrome mistakenly detects the encoding of the page.

However, it seems as though in recent versions of Chrome, this option to manually override the character encoding is… missing. Either missing, or moved somewhere very obscure, because I cannot find it anywhere.

I'm currently looking at a mojibake-filled webpage in what I presume should be Russian, which is entirely unreadable and unusable because Chrome is mistakenly rendering it with the wrong character encoding.

How can I change the character encoding for a webpage in Google Chrome?

Edit: For reference, I'm on Version 55.0.2883.87 m, and the encoding option is flat-out missing from the Tools menu:

enter image description here

Donald Duck
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Meshaal
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2 Answers2

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Unfortunately… a Christmas-box from Google Chrome: Chrome encoding options gone?:

…

Chrome 55 has removed the Encoding menu and Chrome will do auto-encoding detection now:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=597488 - Remove encoding menu

Manual encoding selection is not necessary any more as the new encoding detector is turned on by default.

Manual encoding switching may be able to be done by use of Chrome extensions.

Marked as best answer by Kameron M - Community Manager

JosefZ
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    *sigh~* Thanks for the information; rather a pity the new encoding detector is hot garbage. – Meshaal Dec 27 '16 at 01:47
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    Hum… I miss that option as well; I use this feature via [IE Tab](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ie-tab/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog) extension currently lacking better solution:( – JosefZ Dec 27 '16 at 08:12
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    This is a really sad turn of events. It seems that Chrome cannot correctly detect Shift-JIS encoding properly in all cases, which is becoming a hassle for me while doing research on Japanese webpages that haven't been updated in many years... At least Firefox lets me manually select Shift-JIS. – recognizer Feb 09 '17 at 21:29
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    Unfortunately... many websites still mangle their own encodings. – Nick T Jun 13 '17 at 20:43
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    Chrome can't even detect codepage on the saved G+ page. This is retarded. Google's community managers are retarded too if they mark such answers as accepted and freeze threads so I can't even tell them there that they broke Chrome. – Nakilon Feb 13 '18 at 06:44
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    What is even more awful, to be able to use these extensions on the saved pages you have to allow them "access to file:// urls" – Nakilon Feb 13 '18 at 06:58
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    Just adding my comment here *screaming* that whoever decided to remove this probably don't read anything other then ASCII, coming here after opening a txt file that isn't detected correctly, not to mention all pages that needs different encodings. – NiKiZe Jun 10 '18 at 16:42
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    It seems Chrome is drifting towards what has been the IE behavior for year, making life of developers and users more and more miserable! – Marco Demaio Dec 18 '18 at 17:06
  • Nor can it detect the standard MS-DOS Cyrillic encoding, [code page 866](http://tortuga.angarsk.su/unrar/harmsd08/harms_1.txt). On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with an automatic encoding detection *per se*, as long as the good old manual selector is still available. But *Chrome* is becoming increasingly lamer-oriented—it has started targeing users that do not know what a character encoding is. – Anton Shepelev Apr 24 '20 at 18:22
  • @Ant_222 yes, it's wrong recognized as Cyrillic encoding [Windows-1251](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1251) (tested in Chrome _IE tab extension_ as well as in Firefox). – JosefZ Apr 24 '20 at 20:14
  • @JosefZ: I wonder how it knew it was *Cyrillic* at all? Must be a bug... – Anton Shepelev Apr 26 '20 at 18:38
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    Why some1 decide remove that simple and yet usable feature before actually having something better? WHY!?!?!? – Cody Tookode Dec 04 '20 at 06:56
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    This is rich. Found out today, that it can't even autodetect UTF-8. – Dmitri Urbanowicz Apr 12 '21 at 07:16
  • Truly rich. I had to manually set UTF-8, on a page returning `content-type: text/plain` – mcint Jan 20 '23 at 00:20
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You can now use extensions. Here is an example https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/set-character-encoding/bpojelgakakmcfmjfilgdlmhefphglae

user2686101
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