Bring Character Encoding Menu Back to Chrome with Extension

This is a help page for Chrome Set Character Encoding extension, which provides right-click menu to let user manually set character encoding for web pages. This extension is a casual product made by deep-watch, so its help page is hosted here. The main business of deep-watch is smarter page change monitoring service. If you have interest, welcome to take a tour at deep-watch index page.

Update in V0.51

Starting from Chrome 72, old versions will stop working because new Chrome requires extensions to request for extra permission to modify response header. V0.51 is patched to support Chrome 72.
 

Update in V0.50

V0.50 added two exciting features.

1. You can remove menu items that are surely never to be used.
2. You can add any character set that is not listed in default menu.

In combination, these two features can make the menu extremely simple but useful, like something below.

Here we show how to make it.

1. At upper-right corner of browser window, click the icon, then click Options in the pop-up menu.
   
    
2. The option page will open, then you can remove a pre-defined encoding from menu by turning it off, or add user-defined encodings by clicking the Add button. For user-defined encodings, the Language field can be any string as long as the Encoding field is a valid entry listed here. Even if not valid, the browser simply ignores it, so don't fear to play with it.
    
   
    
3. Click the Save button, then close option page.
    

Note that new settings take effect only after option page closed. You can revisit the same option page at any time.
 

That's all! Let's enjoy a simpler world!

Below is information that has been existed since the very beginning.

• The selected character set will automatically apply to all pages on the same site. You can select "Use page default" to cancel it.
   
• This extension modifies http response headers to override original character set, so when installing Chrome will say "it can read and change all your data on the websites you visit". Just let it go because that is exactly how it works.
   
• Upon changing encoding, the page will reload itself to refetch http headers. If the page is an output after submitting some form, the reloading may fail because of loss of input data. In that case, just go back to the page where you submitted the data. Resubmit the form, then the selected coding will apply to result page.
   
• If not work, check if there are any other extensions trying to modify the same http headers. Because Chrome only allow one extension to modify headers, as explained here.
   
• Starting from v0.4, it supports changing encoding of local files, but you need check 'Allow access to file URLs' in extension manage page to make it work.

This tool is a casual product made by deep-watch, so its help page is hosted here. The main business of deep-watch is smarter page change monitoring service. If you have interest, welcome to take a tour at deep-watch index page.