Ubuntu
firefox package

  1. Bug #550222
  2. Comment #2

Comment 2 for bug 550222

Revision history for this message
In , David Planella (dpm) wrote :

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ca; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ca; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.8

(Forwarded from the downstream bug report at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-translations/+bug/550222)

Firefox appears to misinterpret the locale environment variables set by the Language Support tool. It uses LANG instead of LANGUAGE.

Use case:
I am a software engineer, so I prefer to have my user interface language set to English ("en_GB" if possible, fall back to "en"). I'm Dutch and live in the Netherlands, so all measurements, paper sizes, and currency localization are set to "nl_NL". This works for all GTK+ applications as expected. Firefox however sets its interface language to Dutch instead of English.

As far as I can tell, the Language Support tool in Lucid Lynx sets LANGUAGE and LANG:

LANG=nl_NL.utf8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the LANGUAGE environment variable to LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
2. Set the LANG environment variable to LANG=nl_NL.utf8
3. Start Firefox
Actual Results:
Firefox starts up in Dutch, as per the value in LANG

Expected Results:
Firefox should start in English, as per the value in LANGUAGE, which seems to be ignored.

According to [1], "The LANGUAGE environment variable is examined first to determine the message catalogs to be used.". This is the behaviour for all GTK applications in a Linux-based OS.

[1] http://www.openi18n.org/docs/html/LI18NUX-2000-amd4.htm

Possibly related downstream bugs:
* https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/539761 (LC_MESSAGES misinterpreted)