Closed Bug 1739876 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

Colorways UI does not respect system language

Categories

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Untriaged
Version:
Firefox 94
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED INVALID

People

(Reporter: gbs, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.1 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Have a computer set to American English while physically present in the UK.
  2. Open Firefox for the first time since upgrading to Firefox 94, or go to about:addons > Themes.

Actual results:

I get prompted to select a "colourway", i.e. the UK spelling.

Expected results:

I get prompted to select a "colorway", respecting my system setting to use American English.

Wait, sorry, this doesn't actually have to do with Colorways in particular - it looks like my Firefox language as a whole is sent to English (United Kingdom). I think I installed Firefox while I was here, so I guess Firefox is trying to guess a language based on IP address on first install, instead of respecting the system language? That seems broken.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE

(In reply to gbs from comment #1)

Wait, sorry, this doesn't actually have to do with Colorways in particular - it looks like my Firefox language as a whole is sent to English (United Kingdom). I think I installed Firefox while I was here, so I guess Firefox is trying to guess a language based on IP address on first install, instead of respecting the system language? That seems broken.

Firefox doesn't do any guessing when it comes to languages, it runs in the language you installed.

You downloaded the en-GB version from mozilla.org, likely because a search engine took you there (based on location).

Resolution: DUPLICATE → INVALID

You downloaded the en-GB version from mozilla.org, likely because a search engine took you there (based on location).

Yep, that seems to be exactly what happened.

But the fact remains that this behavior is quite surprising. Currently, for someone like me to get the right language version of Firefox, I would need to:

  1. Know that Firefox—unlike any other macOS software I'm aware of—ships per-language builds, instead of relying on the OS's language setting.
  2. Check the URL of my Firefox download page to make sure it's for the right language (the language I'm downloading doesn't appear anywhere on the page itself).

I think fixing (1) is the right solution here (surely translation data for every language isn't going to make much of an impact on Firefox's 300 MB size), but I imagine there are technical reasons that isn't as easy as it sounds.

(2) seems pretty easy to fix, though—if someone visits a download page that doesn't match their Accept-Language header, it seems very reasonable to include some text below the download button noting that fact and providing a link to the other download page.

For 1, there's work happening to change the way Firefox is build and shipped, but it's indeed a lot of work.

For 2, it would probably be bug 1440488.

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