1346190 - Earlybird on OS X does not use User's assigned system date format

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1344594

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Thomas Tempelmann]

Attachment: screenshots.zip

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/602.4.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.3 Safari/602.4.8

Steps to reproduce:

I am using the Mac OS X version of "54.0a2 (2017-03-10) (64-bit)". Have installed it freshly, haven't used Thunderbird for many years.

The docs (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format) suggest that Thunderbird on the Mac should simply observe the format I've set in the OSX's System Preferences (though, while the page says "In Mac OS X, go to the "International" panel in System Preferences.", it should actually direct to the "Language & Region" panel, see my screenshot where it's titled like that).

While I've set my system Language to English, my Locale is set to German, and has been further customized. See screenshot.

Note that I have no explicit dateformat settings in the prefs, see screenshot.


Actual results:

Despite my Locale using German date and time format (e.g. "20.04.2016 16:44" for April 4, 2016, 4:44 PM), Thunderbird shows US-EN format (4/20/2016 4:44 PM). That's not right.


Expected results:

I expect to see the data format I've set in the system-wide Language & Region panel.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Quite unfortunate. Bug 1344594. Mozilla core have decided the Firefox and Thunderbird will follow the date/time format set by the build locale. So if you want German time format, you need to install a German localised version of TB from: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-aurora-l10n/
Since you seem to prefer English, maybe get an en-GB version.

Note that there are currently no localised versions for Windows due to bug 1345422.

Comment 2

[Thomas Tempelmann]

That's unfortunate, indeed. If I understand this right, it used to work before, but now, with the code code getting moved from C++ to JS, there's currently no x-platform code to handle this? Then there's still hope it'll eventually get resolved.

I wonder if this should at least open a new ticket for the documentation, which is currently wrong (as I pointed out), but will be even wronger soon if v54 is released.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Yes, it worked before, but the C++ interface used in TB has undergone various changes for the worse, currently being at its worst (for the TB use case). There are plans to fix this, yes, but I have no ETA.

Which documentation are you referring to? On http://kb.mozillazine.org?

Comment 4

[Thomas Tempelmann]

Yes, I was referring to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format