566590 - firefox does not follow $LANGUAGE

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Nicolò Chieffo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3

firefox starts using the language specified in $LANG instead of the ones specified in $LANGUAGE

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. set the LANGUAGE variable to "en"
2. set the LANG variable to "it_IT.uft-8" (or anything different)
3. start firefox
Actual Results:  
firefox is in Italian

Expected Results:  
Firefox should be in english

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Why do you want to use $LANGUAGE ? $LANG is used to change the locale for libc.

Comment 2

[Nicolò Chieffo]

My distribution (ubuntu) uses $LANGUAGE and not $LANG

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Firefox doesn't. $LANG is the standard in the C library.

Ubuntu seems to have set intl.locale.matchOS variable to true (default is false), and installed the extra langpacks. Otherwise $LANG isn't even used.

Comment 4

[Nicolò Chieffo]

I don't exactly know what you are saying because I'm not an expert of locales, but I'm reopening the bug because all apps follow the $LANGUAGE variable (nautilus, gedit, gnome-terminal, ecc.) and firefox is the only one which follows $LANG.

also read here: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Locale-Environment-Variables.html#Locale-Environment-Variables
and here: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/The-LANGUAGE-variable.html#The-LANGUAGE-variable

Comment 5

[Ioana (away)]

Is this still an issue with current Firefox versions (23, 24, 25)?

Comment 6

[John Vandenberg]

See bug 419176 comment 3 for this bug being confirmed in 2008.

(In reply to Ioana Budnar, QA [:ioana] from comment #5)
> Is this still an issue with current Firefox versions (23, 24, 25)?

Yes.  On Fedora Core 19, Firefox 24 (standard distro package):

$ LC_ALL=en_US LANG=it_IT.utf-8 firefox # English UI
$ LANGUAGE=en_US LANG=it_IT.utf-8 firefox # Italian UI

The second should also be English UI.

Comment 9

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

I can confirm that this bug is still valid in Firefox 28. And curiously, the LANGUAGE variables *does* affect the UI language in Firefox, but in the wrong way; it actually *stops* the LANG variable working in some cases. Example:

I have LANG set to

nn_NO.UTF-8

and LANGUAGE set to

nn:no:nb:da:en_GB:en@quot

i.e., with Norwegian Nynorsk (nn) as my preferred language + some alternative language for applications that aren’t translated into Norwegian Nynorsk. When I start Firefox, I get the *English* UI, instead of the Norwegian Nynorsk UI, even though I *do* have the Norwegian Nynorsk language pack for Firefox installed.

If I instead completely remove the LANGUAGE environment variable, i.e., by typing

export LANGUAGE=

before starting Firefox, I *do* get the correct UI language, i.e. Norwegian Nynorsk. So it look like Firefox *tries* to handle the LANGUAGE variable, but it doesn’t handle it properly. The result is that Firefox always uses the English UI.