When a font claims to support a character but does not have a glyph for it, Safari renders the white box glyph instead of using a fallback font. In the associated URL, the font is Verdana and the characters in question are combining marks. One of the characters without a glyph is U+0314 COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE. According to UnicodeChecker, Verdanna supports this character, but selecting it renders absolutely no glyph at all. When WebKit encounters the missing glyph, it should behave as if the font didn't claim to support the character at all, but instead it renders the white box. In odd quirk of this is that, because the original character was a combining mark, WebKit doesn't allow the user to select the white box glyphs directly but must select the text to both sides of it in order to copy the text. Normally this is because combining marks combine with the previous character and thus it doesn't make sense to try and select them, but in this case they're showing up as unselectable white boxes and it's just confusing. Also note that if I disable the Verdana font, whatever font WebKit is using as a replacement also exhibits the same behavior. Screenshot of original problem: http://quicksnapper.com/kballard/image/webkit-combining-chars-white-boxes/ Screenshot after Verdana is disabled: http://quicksnapper.com/kballard/image/webkit-combining-chars-white-glyph-verdana-disabled/