Firefox Locales should install locale specific search plugins

[Kyromaster]

When I install ubuntu in german, in firefox I still have the "default" search engines like the english wikipedia, and not localised ones

There's much information about this in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-firefox-locale-all/+bug/52537

unfortunately it was closed because the package doesn't exist any more in intrepid, but IMHO this is not a reason not to fix this.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

yes, we need to evaluation how we can do this properly. are those searchplugins distributed by upstream translation .xpi files too or just by the "pre" localized build?

[Bruno (bruno666-666)]

These are not in .xpi files, xml files for searchplugins are embedded with localized builds.

[Steffan Jacobs (steffanjacobs)]

Default bookmarks/RSS feeds are also not localized.

E.g. When using the Dutch localized version of firefox I still get the BBC news RSS instead of the NOS like in the Dutch localized version on Windows.

[Steffan Jacobs (steffanjacobs)]

This bug is still present in Firefox 3.5 so have marked it as such.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Sorry but Firefox-3.0 has reached EOL and will not get anymore updates from Ubuntu or upstream Mozilla.

Is this still a problem with latest stable version of Firefox-3.5 from our repos?

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

can anyone reproduce this in 3.0

[Jānis Kangarooo (kangarooo)]

What if someone who speaks in one language is in different country?
There should be a wizard who asks Do you want this language packege searches or different or advanced?
When installing Latvian Language i maybe want my Xubuntu to be in Latvian but i dont want Latvian search engine.
I installed for 2 friends Xubuntu and they want Xubuntu to be russian but firefox put location bar search to be yandex witch totaly sucks and even more sucks that i need to manualy go to about:config and change that.
So wizard checks language and asks - recomended for ur language is google.lv and something else.
But i would choose Legacy option with default search engines or maybe by name i would find a search engine package like firefox addons package.

[Steffan Jacobs (steffanjacobs)]

I can reproduce this in both 3.0 (in 8.04 LTS, which will still be supported on the desktop for a while) and 3.5 (in Karmic), so I have switched both to confirmed.

It should be considered however that this is probably not a bug that should be fixed in an LTS release, or even a stable one. I am pretty new to all this, so if anyone with more experience feels this means the bug should be invalid, then please make it so.

@Kangaroo:

The suggestion you make above might be a good idea, but I feel it is out of scope for this bug or even Ubuntu. The point of this bug is that for all but American users, you get an experience using Firefox in Ubuntu that is less than that of a separately downloaded Firefox, like you would also use on Windows or Mac. If you download a Latvian version of Firefox from Mozilla, you would get the Latvian search engines as well, with no choice offered. Anyone using the Ubuntu package currently does not get that and that should be improved. You might want to make your suggestion to Mozilla though, any improvements to Mozilla upstream will end up in Ubuntu eventually.

[Jānis Kangarooo (kangarooo)]

In #Firefox i post this link and got a response
(01:27:18 PM) kbrosnan: the first seems to be a ubuntu decision. firefox as shipped by mozilla has everything localized in one downloadable file
anyone understand that?
wheres that file?
who messed it up?
what can be done about it? could a wizard added?
can someone contact if known who works in firefox?

[Jānis Kangarooo (kangarooo)]

Make FF not look what language Distro is installed but make look in witch country Distro is like distro knows from where to download updates.
Just like that FF should check location (not language installed) and put location searches.
So if im in frence but installed Latvian.
ahh heres another problem. I would like to have the same as i get in Latvia- latvian google.
Ok but wizzard as in comment #7 would solve this.

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

Localized search plugins of each language can be found in mozilla's repository.
http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n/l10n-src-verification/file/c0ae230a1c61/reference/browser/1.9.2/
And other localization materials is also found.
http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central

It is great that we could get these plugins in firefox.

BTW, in the original reporter Michael Stather's locale, German,
Yahoo.com and Google is localized, but Amazon and Wikipedia is not.
This comes from language-pack-de in Lucid.

So, We had better fix not Firefox, but language-pack-*.

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

@Nobuto MURATA: Is this really because of the language-pack or because Google and Yahoo use Geolocation to find out the country you're in and redirect to the appropiate page?

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

bug is in language-pack-de-base not language-pack-de! language-pack-de-base contains the relevant files

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

This should be easy to fix: Nobuto MURATA was right. Yahoo and Google are already localized in language-pack-de-base. The relevant .xml-files are copied to /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/*yourlanguage*. We just have to change a few lines in these .xml-files to localize them.

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

This is an example for Wikipedia in German. You just need to copy it to the folder mentioned in my previous post and restart firefox. It works similar for the other searchplugins. I'm trying to find out where the RSS-feeds are saved so we can localize them too.

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

Ok, I modified all the .xml-files for all of the search engines that have a German interface. Please test by copying to the folder mentioned in comment #14. This "patch" works for the German language pack only. It only fixes the searchplugins and not the default RSS-Feed or Mozilla-Links.

[cameleon (el-cameleon-1)]

Is there any chance that it lands in time for Maverick?

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Quite unlikely for Maverick, but it is something I'd like to fix

[Jawnboy (john-bazza)]

Also affects en-IE and en-GB locale.

[guerda (derguerda)]

If we found out that this problem is not caused by firefox but by language-pack-base-*, why don't we close this bug and re-open it for language-pack-base-*?

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

No, really, please don't. You would need a task for every single language pack added to the bug, which would create a horrendous amount of bug noise for translators.

We already know where the issue is

[guerda (derguerda)]

Indeed, this would be not very effective.
What would be the correct way? How can we put effort in this so that this annoyance is gone soon?

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

The correct way would probably be to just wait patiently. Firefox localization is something that we're going to be discussing at UDS in October.

[Dario Panico (dariopnc-)]

@Chris Coulson

So... what came out of UDS?

[Jan Girke (jangirke)]

Hi I modified the wikipedia searchplugin try it out.
If I knew the location I would have done it myself,
but right now I am in a hurry.

[Flames_in_Paradise (ellisistfroh-deactivatedaccount)]

This bug affects me since years I really have no faith in Ubuntu WHY it takes such a long time to settle this matter. 4 the time beeing there is a Firefox-Addon call "add to searchbar"... This will help an unsophisticated user to get at least Wikipedia.de into list _btw_ just installed Mandriva 2010.2 KDE - Same thing there... Go - get money from ebay.de as a pre-install

This is a very sad story ....

[Jan Girke (jangirke)]

I think it is fixed. Otherwise see below:

You can copy my "patch" above** in
your profile directory. In Ubuntu it
is somewhere down that road:
/home/username/.mozilla/firefox/profilename*/searchplugins/
You have to use ctrl+H to show
hidden files and directories and
you can even copy profiles from
Ubuntu to Windows and vice versa.

*profilename=A weird assortment of
letters and numbers.

**to download right click:
"Just the patch for the german Wikipedia searchplugin could not test it"
and choose "save as" and type in
the name "wikipedia-de.xml".
Make sure you turned off the hide
 known file extensions if you try it
in Windows.
To do it open a Explorer Window
and choose "Tools"->
"Folder options..."->View->
uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types".
:)
Extensive Help!

[David Planella (dpm)]

Some background info that has been shared on the ubuntu-translators list:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Firefox/Productization
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/L10n_Requirements

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Not a release critical bug for Natty, it's a wishlist item.

[das_nervt (sm67de)]

Hello,
if this is not solved, I don't think that this is a topic for a wish-list...

This is not easy to solve, especially for absolute beginners it is Important to have well selected search plugins.

This Bug does also affect the Printing : Please scale the Default Page size to A4 ! Nobody uses Letter in Europe.

This is not really a critical thing, but every time you Install Ubuntu it is annoying to solve.

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

There are actually much more people on the world using A4 than Letter. To the best of my knowledge, the USA is the only country using Letter-sized paper. And even there some people start using A4.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This one will be fixed properly in Oneiric. We'll be removing the current semi-localized searchplugins from langpack-o-matic and merging the Firefox l10n data (including upstream fully localized searchplugins) in to the Firefox source package. We'll then distribute those searchplugins directly from the firefox source.

This also means that a lot of locales are going to get extra (new) locale-specific searchplugins automatically :)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I didn't add a bug reference in the changelog, but this will be fixed once I upload http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mozillateam/firefox/firefox-beta.head/revision/849 to oneiric. This will provide locale-specific plugins in the language packs built by Firefox

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package firefox - 5.0~b2+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1

---------------
firefox (5.0~b2+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu1) oneiric; urgency=low

  * New upstream release from the beta channel (FIREFOX_5_0b2_BUILD1)
    - Fixes LP: #765970

  * Switch to mozilla-beta
    - update debian/mozclient/firefox.conf
  * Drop support for building with an external xulrunner
    - update debian/apport/firefox.in
    - update debian/firefox.install.in
    - update debian/firefox.lintian-overrides.in
    - update debian/firefox.sh.in
    - update debian/mozconfig.in
    - update debian/rules
  * Ditch all the version-number based branding selection. Do this all
    purely on the channel name now
    - remove debian/firefox-beta.desktop.in
    - remove debian/firefox-nightly.desktop.in
    - remove debian/firefox-unofficial.desktop.in
    - rename debian/firefox-final.desktop.in => debian/firefox.desktop.in
    - update debian/firefox.desktop.in
    - update debian/rules
    - update debian/firefox.sh.in
  * Drop the DEB_ENABLE_IPC option, now that IPC is mandatory
    - update debian/rules
    - update debian/apport/firefox.in
    - update debian/firefox.install.in
    - update debian/mozconfig.in
  * Build language packs directly from the firefox source
    + Fixes LP: #294187 - Firefox Locales should install locale specific
      search plugins
    + Rip out the bits to create a en-US.xpi
      - update debian/rules
      - remove debian/translation-support/install.rdf.in
    + Include compare-locales FIREFOX_5_0b1_BUILD1 from
      http://hg.mozilla.org/build/compare-locales. It's needed for merging
      en-US strings with incomplete locales
    + Pull l10n data in to tarball from bzr
      - update debian/mozclient/firefox.conf
    + Configure build for creating language packs by configuring with
      "--with-l10n-base="
      - update debian/mozconfig.in
    + Store the list of locales to ship, and provide a way of automatically
      generating that list and the control file entries from the upstream
      source. Also provide a way to blacklist languages. We map languages
      to package names using langpack-o-matic (and also get descriptions
      from there too)
      - update debian/rules
      - add debian/locales-supported
      - add debian/control.langpacks
      - update debian/control
      - add debian/locale-blacklist
      - add debian/refresh-supported-locales.pl
    + Add common-build-indep hook to build the translation xpi's
      - update debian/rules
    + Add common-binary-post-install-indep to install the xpi's and
      searchplugins in to the correct debian packages
      - update debian/rules
      - add debian/get-xpi-id.py
    + When rebuilding debian/control in the clean target, fail the build
      if the control file was out-of-date. This ensures that we don't
      accidentally drop language packs, and forces me to maintain an
      up-to-date control file in bzr
      - update debian/rules
    + Apply vendor patches to localized searchplugins too
      - update debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-amazon.patch
      - add debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-baidu.patch
      - update debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-google.p...

[Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57)]

Firefox 5.0 is now in natty-proposed. The status should be Fix Commited/verification-needed, why is it Wont Fix?

[Hendrik Schrieber (hennekn)]

Seems to be fixed in Natty using Firefox 5 from proposed.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package firefox - 5.0+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1

---------------
firefox (5.0+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.11.04.1) natty-security; urgency=low

  * New upstream release from the stable channel (FIREFOX_5_0_BUILD1)
    - see LP: #798484 for USN information

  * Update globalmenu-extension to 1.0.6
  * Switch to mozilla-beta
    - update debian/mozclient/firefox.conf
  * Drop the ability to build with an external xulrunner, and all the packaging
    complexity which went with it
    - update debian/apport/firefox.in
    - update debian/firefox.install.in
    - update debian/firefox.lintian-overrides.in
    - update debian/firefox.sh.in
    - update debian/mozconfig.in
    - update debian/rules
  * Build language packs directly from the firefox source
    + Fixes LP: #294187 - Firefox Locales should install locale specific
      search plugins
    + Rip out the bits to create a en-US.xpi
      - update debian/rules
      - remove debian/translation-support/install.rdf.in
    + Include compare-locales FIREFOX_5_0b1_BUILD1 from
      http://hg.mozilla.org/build/compare-locales. It's needed for merging
      en-US strings with incomplete locales
    + Pull l10n data in to tarball from bzr
      - update debian/mozclient/firefox.conf
    + Configure build for creating language packs by configuring with
      "--with-l10n-base="
      - update debian/mozconfig.in
    + Store the list of locales to ship, and provide a way of automatically
      generating that list and the control file entries from the upstream
      source. Also provide a way to blacklist languages. We map languages
      to package names using langpack-o-matic (and also get descriptions
      from there too)
      - update debian/rules
      - add debian/locales-supported
      - add debian/control.langpacks
      - update debian/control
      - add debian/locale-blacklist
      - add debian/refresh-supported-locales.pl
    + Add common-build-indep hook to build the translation xpi's
      - update debian/rules
    + Add common-binary-post-install-indep to install the xpi's and
      searchplugins in to the correct debian packages
      - update debian/rules
      - add debian/get-xpi-id.py
    + When rebuilding debian/control in the clean target, fail the build
      if the control file was out-of-date. This ensures that we don't
      accidentally drop language packs, and forces me to maintain an
      up-to-date control file in bzr
      - update debian/rules
    + Apply vendor patches to localized searchplugins too
      - update debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-amazon.patch
      - add debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-baidu.patch
      - update debian/patches/ubuntu-codes-google.patch
  * Ditch all the version-number based branding selection. Do this all
    purely on the channel name now
    - remove debian/firefox-beta.desktop.in
    - remove debian/firefox-nightly.desktop.in
    - remove debian/firefox-unofficial.desktop.in
    - rename debian/firefox-final.desktop.in => debian/firefox.desktop.in
    - update debian/firefox.desktop.in
    - update debian/rules
    - update debian/firefox.sh.in
  * Drop the DEB_ENABLE_IPC option, now that IPC is mandator...

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

Now this bug was fixed in Firefox itself. I will mark language-pack-de-base as Invalid.
Thank you for your great work.

[amar (amarendra)]

Not fixed.
Ubuntu 11.10, Firefox 11.0