What's the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?

Question

What\'s different between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without a BOM? Which is better?

Answer 1

Here is my experience with Visual Studio, Sourcetree and Bitbucket pull requests, which has been giving me some problems:

So it turns out BOM with a signature will include a red dot character on each file when reviewing a pull request (it can be quite annoying).

If you hover on it, it will show a character like "ufeff", but it turns out Sourcetree does not show these types of bytemarks, so it will most likely end up in your pull requests, which should be ok because that's how Visual Studio 2017 encodes new files now, so maybe Bitbucket should ignore this or make it show in another way, more info here:

Red dot marker BitBucket diff view