google in incomprehensible language

[Dario Panico]

Binary package hint: firefox

sometimes when I search in firefox using the searchbar in the top-right corner i obtain the google page in an incomprehensible language (the website is http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=C650D&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 when I search for C650D - I tried right now to test).

I speak italian, the entire OS is localized correctly and even google accordingly, since i have a google account. So I really cannot understand nothing.

this happed with other searches (not all of them).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: firefox 3.6.10+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-22.34-generic 2.6.35.4
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-22-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 15 18:55:49 2010
FirefoxPackages:
 firefox 3.6.10+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
 firefox-gnome-support 3.6.10+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
 firefox-branding 3.6.10+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu3
 abroswer N/A
 abrowser-branding N/A
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=it_IT.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox

[Dario Panico (dariopnc-)]

please, this is VERY annoying and makes searches a PAIN, please consider this!

[Dario Panico (dariopnc-)]

i found out that the google language is set to chr
(http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=chr)

i searched around and found that (accordingly to http://whatsmyuseragent.com/) my user agent is

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13

but, looking in the full header i found:

HTTP_CONNECTION:keep-alive
HTTP_KEEP_ALIVE:115
HTTP_ACCEPT:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING:gzip,deflate
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE:chrome://global/locale/intl.properties
HTTP_HOST:whatsmyuseragent.com
HTTP_REFERER:http://www.google.it/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhatsmyuseragent.com%2F&rct=j&q=my%20user%20agent&ei=tWMDTe39CtP54gaa0O2KCg&usg=AFQjCNHwNrQKiEOku6D-Wt7LOJr9pkejaA&sig2=38xD1ys6-bx2OZLwp8axPw
HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13

I personally think that the relevant part is
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE:chrome://global/locale/intl.properties, whose first characters are "chr", maybe this string is not well interpreted by google.

These are my guess, i really don't know nothing about those things so i'd probably be wrong...

Please, consider help me with this bug.

Thanks for reading

[Dario Panico (dariopan)]

I found out that the strange language is Cheerokee...

Please help me solve this issue! I can't use firefox!

[Oliver Horn (oliverhorn)]

Hi,

I can confirm what Dario experienced. I could reproduce this problem with the following:

I started with a clean fresh .mozilla folder. The preferred language settings of firefox say, that I prefer
Deutsch/Deutschland [de]
Deutsch [de]
Englisch/Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika [en-us]
Englisch [en]

(I am a german user.)

Then I activated firefox sync. The preferred language settings suddenly got deleted and something else was put in there. After that, google.com was shown in those unreadable signs as in Darios screenshot.

I don't know if that is still a bug or if it's an old bug that survived through my sync account. I now seem to have the correct preferred languages and it works fine again.

[Kim Alex Olsen (kao-purpurdata)]

Hi

I have the same problem, I speak Danish and all language settings are danish/Denmark.
But suddenly my firefox Google search began to speak russian or somthing semilar.

After a lot of try and errors I found a workaround :

Edit the file
             /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

and change this line :

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">

with the line of your preferred language - for my part it woulld be :

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.dk/search">

That solved my problem, but only until the next update of firefox , then I have to do it again.

[Dario Panico (dariopan)]

bug confirmed by 3 people

[BenHoughton (ben-houghton-tk)]

This is to do with something (chrome I believe) messing up your firefox settings and can be fixed by resetting the intl.accept_languages variable (browse to about:config). I don't know why but this variable gets set to chrome://something-or-other when it should be set to your language type (mine is en-gb,en). Reset this value and all will be ok again.

By the way the incomprehensible language is Cherokee and is set on google because the intl.accept_languages value uses the first 3 letters to select your language (chr from 'chrome' is Google's language code for Cherokee).

I've no idea why this happens but as I say I suspect Google Chrome may be involved.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

No, Google Chrome really is *not* involved here, at all. Where did that vague assumption even come from? My comments in the master bug explain the cause of this.

[gsoundsgood (gsoundsgood)]

I had the same today, happened all of a sudden this morning (ubuntu 10.10, but using FF4, whole system is in Italian).

the string in the about:config mentioned by BenHoughton was unexplainably set to: "chrome://global/locale/intl.properties", instead of simply "it" (for Italian), as it should be in my case. this is why google gets "chr" as the first letter, and thinks I'm Cherokee (wonder how this affects their users statitics, and if anyone in Mountain view even noticed this).

Reversing that string to "it" solves the problem.

I guess it has something to do with the automatically installed extension "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications", since at the same time I had my firefox home page automatically changed to "chrome://ubufox/locale/ubufox.properties", which displays this text (instead of the standard Ubuntu style google interface):

helloMessage=Ciao mondo!
helloMessageTitle=Ciao
prefMessage=Int Pref Value: %d
<email address hidden>=Pacchetto Firefox Ubuntu.
ubufox.pluginWizard.availablePluginsPage.description.label=Scegliere un plugin per il tipo di media
browser.startup.homepage=about:startpage
browser.throbber.url=file:///usr/share/ubuntu-artwork/home/index.html
app.update.url.details=file:///usr/share/ubuntu-artwork/home/index.html
startup.homepage_override_url=about:blank
startup.homepage_welcome_url=about:blank
ubufox.pluginWizard.description.notfound=No description found in plugin database. \nReport a bug to <email address hidden>
spellchecking.dictionary=it_IT