Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 June 5

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June 5

Did companies like Comcast/RCN lose a lot of customers to T-mobile?

I'm in USA, I took my laptop to stores like Target, Dunkin Donuts, Taco Bell, and Loyola University, and they were all using T-mobile for Wi-Fi. But yet, T-mobile started wireless Internet in 2020, so Xfinity must have lost a lot of customers to T-mobile, I'm wondering how/why that came about. 170.76.231.162 (talk) 21:01, 5 June 2023 (UTC).

T-Mobile purchased Sprint in 2020. Sprint was a major provider for wired internet services, even if they were not the customer-facing company. For example, the T1 line for a company I worked with in 1995 was leased from an internet service provider, but the actual line was owned and operated by Sprint. By 2020, Sprint had a large market in both wired and wireless telecommunications. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 22:26, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh, so I should change my question, did Comcast and such lose a lot of companies to Sprint? Or maybe Sprint bought some telecom companies. I recall in the 2000s, there was 2 main ISPs, Comcast and another. And earlier there were some small 1s like Earthlink and AOL. 170.76.231.162 (talk) 16:58, 6 June 2023 (UTC).

Switching encoding systems in a browser

I'm so old, I remember when seriously malformed web pages were commonplace and browsers had helpful menus. Now web pages with mistaken declarations of encoding system seem to be a lot less common (good!) and browsers helpfully (?) tend to hide options (if they have them at all). This page is a surviving atrocity: the W3C validator reports "The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (utf-8) is different from the value in the <meta> element (euc-jp)"; the page appears to be in euc-jp (and has dozens of mistakes even with this). A decade or so ago, I'd have looked in the menu of IceWeasel or Opera or whatever, and switched the encoding system from "auto" to "euc-jp" just for this one page. In today's wonderful Firefox or Chromium, what does one do and where does one do it? -- Hoary (talk) 23:40, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

There are ways to manually fix this in Developer tools but I would just use a simple extension like this one. PalauanLibertarian^🗣️ 23:47, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, User:PalauanLibertarian! -- Hoary (talk) 08:55, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Firefox offers a "Repair Text Encoding" choice in its View menu.  --Lambiam 09:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Lambiam, I was about to say nope, it doesn't even have a view menu, let alone this item -- but while it does indeed have no view menu, it turns out to have, shall we say, an unborn "repair text encoding" menu item. I've assisted in its birth. Works well! Thank you. -- Hoary (talk) 11:34, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It worked for me on the surviving atrocity linked to above.  --Lambiam 11:43, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It did for me too. -- Hoary (talk) 11:57, 6 June 2023 (UTC)