Just upgraded to 3.8 now my dashboard icons are gone

There is probably a manual edit that can do this as well, but if you download the advanced settings add-on there is an option under the web sites icon to tellFirefox to download fonts embedded in web sites. I had to enable this to get the icons to display. However, now I seem to have some very odd characters in my dashboard fonts and I’ve seen them on some of the posts here as well. I would say it’s an encoding issue, but all my encoding settings seem to be right. It makes it hard to read, particularly when typing inside edit boxes.

I have been searching for a fix to this for several months.
Checking “allow pages to choose their own fonts….” did not work for me.

I finally found this post on the mozilla support forum:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/985274

I looked at about:config via the Firefox location bar
and noticed the value for
gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled was false.

I reset it to true (the default value), reloaded my dashboard and
hey presto, problem solved.