319301 - Make HTTP Accept-Charset header customizable by the user

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement)

Description

[Nicholas Shanks]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-GB; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

The user preference for charsets is ignored, Firefox sends its own thing regardless.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to about:config, set "intl.accept_charsets" to some custom value
2. Access a URL
3. Look at the headers that were sent (e.g. with LiveHeaders, or by using the URL given above, which reports them)

Actual Results:  
Firefox sends "UTF-8,*"

Expected Results:  
I would expect my custom string to have been sent!

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

intl.accept_charsets is a fossil pref which we could probably remove. The Accept-Charset header is made up of the default charset in intl.charset.default, followed by UTF-8 (if the default charset is not UTF-8) and "*".

Comment 2

[Nicholas Shanks]

(In reply to comment #1)
> intl.accept_charsets is a fossil pref which we could probably remove. The
> Accept-Charset header is made up of the default charset in
> intl.charset.default, followed by UTF-8 (if the default charset is not UTF-8)
> and "*".


So how do I set my Accept-Charset header to something other than what you think I might want?

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

What is the use case for this? Can you point to a site where you need a custom Accept-Charset header?

Comment 4

[Nicholas Shanks]

Personally, usage is limited to website development, but I can imagine many non-English speakers would find this quite useful too, just for day-to-day browsing (for example, specifying KOI8-R in preference to UTF-8 will result in smaller downloads and faster surfing for russians)

Comment 5

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

(In reply to comment #3)
> What is the use case for this? Can you point to a site where you need a custom
> Accept-Charset header?
> 

The original bug that added Accept-Charset had some use cases included -- perhaps not for custom ones but nonetheless some use cases. 
See Bug 13393.

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The accept-charset header got removed