The problem

You may have noticed that Firefox v.3 does not display Greek characters (and more generally, the "Symbol" font characters) properly anymore.

There seems to be a heated debate going on about whether this is a breakthrough in computer science, or else a disgrace. At any rate, it is a nuisance to the average Web surfer who cares little about compliance to various obscure acronyms as long as "it works fine".

The fixes

* The "compliant" solution is for Webmasters so replace all the <font face="Symbol">Something</font> by Unicode (which is not going to be done overnight) or else wait until the developers of Firefox reverse their decision.

* A quick solution is to switch back to IE. Whether you like the product and its editor or not, IE reads the "Symbol" font all right.

* A "quick and dirty" solution to the Firefox problem is described at :

In short, it says to open the "WINDOWS/Fonts" folder, then drag-and-drop the "symbol.ttf" file anywhere else (you can't cut-and-paste it). Somehow, it works, and does not impair the capacity of Word to display Greek characters. This operation is of course reversible.

It seems to be reasonably risk free, but please understand that you'll do it under your own reponsability.

Note : Many older Web pages addressing this issue refer to a "fontEncoding.properties" file that does not exist anymore, so don't waste your time looking for it.