262090 - the default Accept-Lang should be localizable

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Jonas Bofjall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.3; Linux 2.6.9-rc2-mm1) (KHTML, like Gecko)
Build Identifier: 

As an example: New installation of Mozilla Firefox on Swedish Windows XP. The 
first first one wants to do is probably to add Swedish in (on top of) the list 
of default languages, under preferences. 
 
I haven't checked other platforms, but I expect them to behave the same(?). The 
default locale should always be used as default language. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

It's already allowes by the branding policy, but there is no automated build-foo
yet.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

would this be build-fu or js-fu? 

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

build-fu, I've been thinking we need to create a separate firefox-l10n.js for a
couple of locale-specific prefs which are hard to make into localized prefs.

Comment 4

[Peter Lairo]

I think this bug should be WONTFIX. Whenever a user installs an (e.g.) ENGLISH
version of a program, he will likely want ENGLISH to be the default language,
regardless of WHERE that user is located. The location setting in the OS is more
for the timezone and date format. The language of the *software* the user
chooses is much *more indicative* of the language preference of that user. If a
user prefers things in Swedish, he will likely download the Swedish version of
Firefox.

This erroneous assumption of "Locale = Language" has annoyed me to no end in
several software products for a long time. The language of the software chosen
is most likely the language the user prefers. Please mark WONTFIX.

Comment 5

[Dimitrios]

I think there are numerous users who would prefer english version yet they would
want a non-english default language. Possible reasons are poor localization,
native terms too long for succesful localization etc.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

oh, I misread the initial report. I am plannin on making the default locale the
localized version of firefox, so that if you download a Swedish firefox, the
default locale is Swedish. I have no intention of doing runtime locale tests, as
those have proven inaccurate most of the time. So I'm morphing this bug to what
I originally thought it was about ;)

Comment 7

[Mario Salzer]

The defaults for the Accept-Language: setting are brain-damaged. Sure,
I've downloaded (IN ABSENCE OF A LOCALIZED VERSION) a English-only
binary package, but having "en-US, en" as default is unacceptable here.
One should expect more insight from developers of a Mozilla derivate. This
effectively torpedes all attempts to get even basic content negotiation
right across the Web.

Many users aren't aware of such configurability options, leaving in the
defaults on fresh installations - especially for this one, because it's
barely described what this setting is for. (Even I do, wastes time.)

Servers and CGI scripts assume English (en-US, en-GB, en) as defaults
anyhow, so it is senseless at best to let this slip through as HARD-WIRED
default in WWW clients.

It was superiour if Mozilla and FireFox supported $LANG as default. On
modern *nix systems, we have this extremely informative environment
setting, so why isn't there taken any advantage of it?! Contrary to
common belief, it is also set right most of the day. If this cannot
be accessed that easily or is too big a hack, then please strip off
the default "en-US, en" completely.
Makes no sense, and given the many many things people already have to
configure with fresh Firefox installations (frustrating if you update
more than a dozen installations), this also easily slips through.

Wrong settings here make a few modern sites less useful (please don't
come with the silly put-country-flags-on-your-pages-then counter argument,
leaving out your Accept-Language was clearly more senseful).
My complaint is, that site developers shouldn't be forced to use
workarounds like ip2country (like Google for example does). Instead
you browser developers should feel more obliged to "do the right thing"
here, IMO :)

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This pref is now localizable using the firefox-l10n.js file. Each localizer
should add

pref("intl.accept_languages", "de-DE, de");

or something appropriate to their firefox-l10n.js file.

Comment 9

[Andras Timar]

What about the intl.accept_languages setting in
toolkit\locales\ab-CD\chrome\global\intl.properties ? Could not we use that one
instead of a new setting?

Comment 10

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> This pref is now localizable using the firefox-l10n.js file. Each localizer
> should add
> 
> pref("intl.accept_languages", "de-DE, de");

Why is this not using a localizable pref!?

In fact, this one seems to be a localizable pref since 2000-07-13 16:46. what's
up here?

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change