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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:

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2 Answers 2

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144

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

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  • 112
    sigh~ Thanks for the information; rather a pity the new encoding detector is hot garbage.
    – Meshaal
    Commented Dec 27, 2016 at 1:47
  • 18
    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
    Commented Feb 9, 2017 at 21:29
  • 9
    Unfortunately... many websites still mangle their own encodings.
    – Nick T
    Commented Jun 13, 2017 at 20:43
  • 4
    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
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 6:58
  • 10
    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
    Commented Jun 10, 2018 at 16:42
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You can now use extensions. Here is an example https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/set-character-encoding/bpojelgakakmcfmjfilgdlmhefphglae

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  • I tried to add a user-defined encoding (ISO-8859-1) in the settings of that addon without any luck. The "save" button does nothing.
    – Anders Lindén
    Commented Jun 16, 2018 at 14:54
  • @AndersLindén Try to close the option page then recheck the result
    – user2686101
    Commented Jun 16, 2018 at 15:22
  • I have tried this extension, but unfortunatelly, it require to refresh the page. And it is not able to resend the POST data :-(
    – Ondrej
    Commented Nov 21, 2018 at 17:14
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    The huge and bloated Chrome needs an extension to do something that all the other browsers have done for decades, since the inception of internet.
    – Anton Shepelev
    Commented Apr 24, 2020 at 18:36
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    @Rainb, It works. Here is an example nta.go.jp/taxes/kids/hatten/txt/14.txt
    – user2686101
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 14:00

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