@burnout426

Thanks for these additional suggestions.

No difference with graphics acceleration disabled.

I have restarted my computer multiple times.

I am able to use Safari, Chrome, and Firefox without this issue at all. Before updating to Opera version 122, I had been on version 114, and it was while on that version that I first experienced the error.

I downloaded OperaGX - same problem. Downloaded Vivaldi – somewhat better there, but issue still present. Downloaded Brave – no problems there.

Unfortunately I do not have any way of rolling back the OS update.

I checked Font Book. There are numerous validation problems. I do not know how to resolve them. There only seem to be "serious problems" with exotic fonts that have no bearing here. Nearly every font is getting flagged for the "minor problem" of having a duplicate. However, these alleged duplicates are not visible anywhere. I have ran the automated function to resolve duplicates multiple times. ...How could these minor Font Book hiccups could kill text in Opera and not other browsers?

I have noticed other weird behaviors that I do not understand, particularly when googling. For example, this search gets me ?-boxes...
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=mandarin+language&sourceid=opera&iе=UTF-8&0e=UTF-8
...but
https://www.google.com/search?&q=mandarin+language
...gets a result that's legible except for a few ?-boxes for some Chinese characters. But sometimes hacking off the "extraneous" portion of the search url doesn't improve the output, especially when I search through the searchbar. Same happened when I google other languages (Hindi, Macedonian) or even "Verizon Wireless". In gmail - everything in the inbox (subjects, text previews) looks fine, but when I open an email or try to write one, it's all ?-boxes.

Given the uninterrupted functionality of other pre-existing browsers (S, F, C) and the mixed results with freshly downloaded browsers (GX, V, B ), does an Opera re-install make sense?

Would a full re-install preserve my currently open tabs? Since I have an enormous number of tabs open and it is more important for me to retain those tabs rather than fix the text (those tabs represent all of my current projects – I can at least copy their URLs to a functioning browser to continue working from where I left off), I am reluctant to do anything that would put them at risk.

Thanks again.

@sgunhouse Can you be significantly more concrete? Otherwise this would not appear to be the right track. Thanks.

@burnout426 said in Broken Text Encoding After Routine OS Update:

Sessions

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately, the issue persisted in this test setup. See attached screenshot from the freshly opened test.

@sgunhouse this is not iOS and does not involve emojis or non-standard fonts.

After updating to OS Sequoia 15.7 (a routine security update), my Opera text encoding completely broke – for nearly every website in any language, almost every character displays as a question mark in a box. Updating my Opera version to current (122.0.5643.24) did not resolve the issue. No other web browsers on my machine appear to have been affected. An add-on to manually change text encoding did not have any effect.

How can this be repaired (without loss of current tabs, history, and other data)? How could this have happened in the first place?

Thank you.