Weird symbols and a hijacked browser?

Sierra_8

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Jul 6, 2017
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Everytime I go to amazon.com or any pages from amazon, I get this weird page full of random symbols, rectangles, ?'s, etc. I ran Malwarebytes, hitmanpro, emisoft, rkill, zemana and got nothing. It's still happening. I've also reset Chrome and uninstalled and reinstalled it. I'm on a Dell xps and I have Windows 10. It also doesn't just happen for amazon, my friend was on my computer and tried to go to this random site but couldn't and got the weird symbols. I don't remember the site though.

UPDATE: I ended up going to  chrome://flags/#enable-brotli (put it into your Omnibox/address bar (search bar)) and then disabling the Brotli Content-Encoding flag and that fixed it!
 
Solution
I ended up disabling the Brotli Content-Encoding flag and that fixed it! Thanks everyone for helping and I hope this thread helps someone else eventually haha.


Can you try using a different browser such as explorer or firefox? See if the problem still persists.
 

Sierra_8

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I tried to post a picture but it wants a url and I just have a jpg
 

Sierra_8

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Jul 6, 2017
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It only happens in Chrome, I tried other browsers
 


Ok, well for Chrome, i remember someone saying it may have something to do with the Helvetica font that Chrome uses, and there are updates to this that have caused these issues.
Unfortunately, i cannot remember how to disable it. I think it needs to be changed to something else like Arial..

Someone on Tom's will know how to do this.
 

kaptainkuftic

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Jul 26, 2016
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So it doesn't sounds like it's an extension or an add-in that's causing it.

It might be worth trying to create a new user profile, as your current one may be corrupted. You can also try clearing cashe/cookies. and disabling hardware acceleration
 

Sierra_8

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Jul 6, 2017
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Ok, let me try that, thanks.
 

Sierra_8

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Jul 6, 2017
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I ended up disabling the Brotli Content-Encoding flag and that fixed it! Thanks everyone for helping and I hope this thread helps someone else eventually haha.
 
Solution

kaptainkuftic

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Jul 26, 2016
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Since I don't think you can select yourself as the solution, you should update your original post with your solution. That way if anybody does stumble into this thread in the future, they might be able to figure it out.
 

Sierra_8

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Oh ok I'll do that now!