657103 - Firefox used wrong UI language when environment variable LANGUAGE is specified

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 566590

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Firefox uses the wrong UI language (English) when environment variable LANGUAGE is specified.

I have set LANGUAGE to nn:no:nb:da:en_GB:en@quot, i.e., with Norwegian Nynorsk as my preferred language (and 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 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 (perhaps Firefox is looking at the older LANG variable, which is set to nn_NO.UTF-8?). So it look like Firefox *tries* to handle the LANGUAGE variable, but it doesn’t handle it properly.

You can find a description of the LANGUAGE variable at http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#The-LANGUAGE-variable (and various other places).

Comment 1

[Thomas Ahlblom]

Duplicate candidates:
Bug 566590, bug 583793 and maybe bug 419176.

Comment 2

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

I don’t think any of the above bug reports are duplicates. Firefox 4 *does* now acknowledge the LANGUAGE variable; it just doesn’t handle it correctly.

Comment 3

[John Vandenberg]

The relevant code is at http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/intl/locale/src/nsLocaleService.cpp#133

It doesnt appear to look at LANGUAGE at all.  My testing also confirms it is not looking at LANGUAGE, therefore this bug is a dup of bug 566590.