299522 - navigator.language property form doesn't follow the documentation

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; ru-ru) AppleWebKit/312.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/312
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

The navigator.language property is "en-US" for U.S. English, while it is explicitly documented to be two-
letter: <http://www.mozilla.org/docs/dom/domref/dom_window_ref42.html>.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://gemal.dk/browserspy/language.html
2. Look at the Language variable.



Expected Results:  
Either documentation or implementation seems to be wrong, I'm not sure which.

Anyhow, it is very important to distinguish between language and locale codes (e.g., "zh-Hans" vs. "zh-
CN").

See also: bug 285267 (navigator.language js property doesn't reflect browser default language).

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I suspect in this case the documentation is what is wrong...  We're pretty definitely using the locale pref for the "language" here.

Comment 2

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

I think the documentation reflects enough of the current reality to be able to close this bug. WFM.