Updating Firefox changes language settings and search engines
Categories
(Firefox :: Search, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: matthias.schrumpf, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:84.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/84.0
Steps to reproduce:
- On Linux (in my case, Manjaro KDE), use the package manager to update Firefox to the most recent available version.
- Install the additional language package for Firefox
- Open Firefox.
Actual results:
The language in Firefox is set to English. German is removed from the list of installed languages. Custom search engines are removed. Setting the language to German replaces the search engines with another set of search engines.
Expected results:
Both language and search engine settings should not be change by an update.
Additional info: This has happened on almost every update for Firefox on desktop linux in the last couple months. There is an older report for a similar issue which is marked as "resolved", but the problem seems to have returned in more recent versions.
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Comment 1•5 years ago
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Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.
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Comment 2•5 years ago
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This should have been fixed in bug 1646016. At this point, it sounds like a distribution problem, with the language pack not being updated with the main app.
The suggestion would be to install the package from mozilla.org and see if the problem still happens when updating.
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Comment 3•5 years ago
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(In reply to matthias.schrumpf from comment #0)
The language in Firefox is set to English. German is removed from the list of installed languages.
This sounds a lot like problems that a different distribution had - xref bug 1672101. From what I've seen the way langpacks are being installed/updated are causing them to be lost at each update. This is really a problem with how the distribution is managing those. I don't think there's anything we can do from within Firefox.
Custom search engines are removed.
Please Can you clarify this point? How have you installed them? Custom engines shouldn't be removed unless they overlap with the defaults.
Setting the language to German replaces the search engines with another set of search engines.
That's expected, we ship different engines based on locale / region, to get the most appropriate set.
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Comment 4•5 years ago
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(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #3)
Thank you for your reply. I tried removing the language pack and re-adding it from within Firefox. But whether that changed anything remains to be seen in the next update.
Custom search engines are removed.
Please Can you clarify this point? How have you installed them? Custom engines shouldn't be removed unless they overlap with the defaults.
Setting the language to German replaces the search engines with another set of search engines.
That's expected, we ship different engines based on locale / region, to get the most appropriate set.
My custom search engines are Ecosia.org (default), dict.cc, Wikipedia German, Wikipedia English, OpenStreetMap and DuckDuckGo, in that order. If I'm not mistaken, almost all of these are replaced initially when the language is set to English.
Once they're set to German, I still have to remove Google, Leo Dictionary, Amazon and Ebay and add the English Wikipedia back in. I do that by opening the site and clicking the green plus button in Firefox's search field.
Once that's done, I go to Settings -> Search, change my default search engine to Ecosia and put the rest of the search engines into my preferred order.
I'm using a Firefox account across several different devices and I use the same search engines everywhere. The account is set to synchronize everything. But search engines don't seem to be included in that. I wonder if there is a way to synchronize search engines across multiple devices according to the most recent manual change, as opposed to changes made automatically in an update or new install.
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Comment 5•5 years ago
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(In reply to matthias.schrumpf from comment #4)
(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #3)
Thank you for your reply. I tried removing the language pack and re-adding it from within Firefox. But whether that changed anything remains to be seen in the next update.
Just to re-iterate: If you've installed the language pack supplied by the distribution, and it is lost again, then it needs your distribution to resolve that. We're quite happy to discuss with them, but fundamentally it is a distribution issue.
My custom search engines are Ecosia.org (default), dict.cc, Wikipedia German, Wikipedia English, OpenStreetMap and DuckDuckGo, in that order. If I'm not mistaken, almost all of these are replaced initially when the language is set to English.
Wikipedia's names overlap with the built-in versions supplied with Firefox, so if you are switched between German and English, you'd be changed to the application default for Wikipedia English, then you would loose it when changed back again. There's not much we can do about that, since we purposely don't allow the names to be the same to prevent hijacking.
For Ecosia, if you install that via the "Add search engine" option when you're on the page, then that conflicts with the Ecosia supplied in the German locale. So similar to Wikipedia you'd loose it if you swap to English and back again. If you've got the Ecosia add-on installed, then it should all be fine.
DuckDuckGo is a application provided engine in both German and English - unless you're installing the HTML version. So that should always be remaining.
OpenStreetMap and dict.cc I'd also expect to remain, even if the language changed.
Once they're set to German, I still have to remove Google, Leo Dictionary, Amazon and Ebay and add the English Wikipedia back in. I do that by opening the site and clicking the green plus button in Firefox's search field.
We've just fixed these, so that if the language changes, we still remember the previous hidden state. This was in bug 1675624 and should be released in Firefox 85, due out near the end of January.
I'm using a Firefox account across several different devices and I use the same search engines everywhere. The account is set to synchronize everything. But search engines don't seem to be included in that. I wonder if there is a way to synchronize search engines across multiple devices according to the most recent manual change, as opposed to changes made automatically in an update or new install.
Synchronising search engines isn't available yet, that's something we're starting to think about.
I'm going to mark this as moved for now - I think the primary problem is with the language packs, and that's up to the distribution to make them work correctly (official builds do generally have langpacks that work fine).
For reference this is mentioned on the Manjoro forum pages, e.g. here https://forum.manjaro.org/t/firefox-82-0-2-sets-search-engines-back-to-default/35847
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