Why does IE8 show question marks instead of bullets in HTML Password Field?

Question

I have a password field in an HTML page that does not display bullets or asterisks when typing the password, but a small box with what appears to be a question mark symbol.

I've tried this in Firefox, and there the normal bullets are shown, just like when entering passwords in other web forms.

Is there a way HTML, CSS, or Javascript can influence what symbols are displayed? We have a fairly complex web framework (Oracle ADF Rich Client), although other applications based on the same framework do not show this behavior.

Answer 1

It's a font issue. IE is trying to render its password-characters using the U+25CF Black Circle character (●, the same one SO uses for its badges), but not finding a glyph for it in the font being used.

This can happen if you've changed the font-family of the <input> element to a font that doesn't contain a glyph for this character, or if the user has fiddled their FontSubstitutes to point MS Shell Dlg, the font the IE uses to render form fields by default, to point to something other than “Microsoft Sans Serif” which does contain a glyph for ●.

Firefox has its own font-fallback algorithms separate from the IE/Windows ones, which are more likely to fall back to a different font that contains ●.