The following is a practical tutorial on “How to deal with the Google Chrome download history icon showing up as a question mark”: Open the menu button consisting of three dots in the upper right corner. Select the settings option to go to the configuration page, scroll down to find the privacy and security section, and click the Clear browsing data button. Check the download history, cookies, and other website data items and confirm the deletion, which can fix the problem of abnormal icons caused by cache corruption. Restart your browser when you’re done and see if the download manager is displaying properly. If the cleaning is ineffective, you can try to adjust the encoding recognition settings. Click the menu icon again to select More tools, find the encoding option in the drop-down list and tap on it. Select Unicode (UTF-8) as the default character set from the pop-up window, and the browser will automatically refresh the page to re-render the download task list. This scheme is especially suitable for the garbled question mark phenomenon caused by language encoding errors. Check the status of network requests in Developer Tools. Press F12 to start the debugging panel, and then switch to the network tab to observe the loading of resources on the current page. Focus on the file transfer records marked with the status code error, right-click the failed item and select Rerequest the operation. For resource links that continue to receive errors, it is recommended to change the download address or contact the website administrator to resolve the source file problem. If the above methods still don’t work, you can manually reset the download manager configuration. Enter chrome://settings/content/all in the address bar to open the content settings page, and locate the download management module to uncheck the option to allow sites to save passwords permanently. Then return to the chrome://extensions page to disable all ad-blocking plug-ins that may interfere with the download process, and troubleshoot the conflicting components one by one. By combining the above steps, most of the abnormal download record icons can be solved. In actual use, it is recommended to give priority to basic solutions such as cache cleaning and encoding reset, and then make in-depth configuration adjustments when encountering stubborn faults. For users who experience this problem frequently, regular preventive maintenance can be performed to maintain system stability.
