For the last month, one little thing has been bothering me. When I load up a Japanese page in Chrome on my Win7-based PC at home, the content loads fine. But if the page has a Japanese title, then the title in the chrome tab renders with boxes (place holders for when you are missing a font).

Today I finally figured out that, if you have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise, you can go to the “language and region” control panel and install Japanese (or whatever other language) as a display language, and those empty boxes will go away. Duh! </sarcasm>

The thing is, this option is only available on Ultimate (and Enterprise). Multi-language support is pretty core to the internet experience these days. I understand switching local UI language is an advanced feature.. but not installing all fonts so you can display all languages by default… really? 

I really hope windows 8 does get rid of all these silly versions. At least within the client side. I can understand the server stuff being different. It is really quite a different beast.

Update: Sigh, something I did caused these to stop showing up correctly again. Seems like going to the “display language” settings and switch to Japanese, then switching back to English fixes the problem. Lame.