290708 - Firefox does not honour if language locale is set to is installed as extension

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-AT; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050319
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

Install Firefox en_US, then install various language extensions (de_DE.xpi,
fr_FR.xpi), then restart Firefox. Only part of Firefox will show german on a
German Windows XP. Same with french, or italian.

Since there is no way to switch what languages is used for display from within
Firefox, there is no way to make Firefox display its user interface with the
language the locale is set for.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install Firefox for en_US
2. add extensions for other languages like de_DE.xpi, fr_FR.xpi
3. restart Firefox to have the UI displayed with the language your locale is set to.

Actual Results:  
The UI stays with en_US and does not use de_DE or fr_FR for UI display. Some
menue items are displayed in German or French, but only those, which are added
for the given locale (mainly menue "Go").

Expected Results:  
Switch the complete UI to the locale set. If locale is de_DE, the whole UI
should be German, if locale is fr_FR, the whole UI should be French.

I could confirm this for
- Windows XP
- Linux (Gentoo)
- FreeBSD 5.4

Thunderbird seems to have the same problem.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

What do you mean by "your locale"? Firefox does not use the system locale (LANG
envvar) by default. If you install a langpack XPI, you have to use the
locale-switcher extension to change your preferred locale (or manually edit prefs).

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

1. This extension is not installed by default. Maybe it would be a good
idea to install it --- even if it is not used, if Firefox doesn't look
at what the system prefers to speak. No one will ever think of
installing an additional extension to switch Firefoxs UI to a different
language if there is no option to select what language it should use!
Most people will just complain, like I did!

2. Why does Firefox give me mixed menues after installing a
languagepack, if it doesn't use the system locale? These switching from
German to French if I change the system language? It looks like there is
code to look at the system locale but this isn't respected overall by
Firefox.