Firefox and websites guessing your language

**SamInside** · March 11th, 2016

Hi.
I recently installed Xubuntu, but I post here because it's not specific to it.
I have a very minor problem that I want to share anyway, because it's weird.
I've set my language as italian; everything works fine, but with Firefox, YouTube and Google give a weird language behaviour.

System information

Xubuntu 14.04.4 LTS for amd64.
Also tested in Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS, since I first tested the original flavor, and I got the same problem.

locale gives:

Code:

LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=it:en
LC_CTYPE="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_TIME=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_NAME=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Xfce is set in italian.

Firefox is up to date, and its GUI is in italian.

Firefox -> Add-ons Manager -> Languages, shows:

Code:

Italian (IT) Language Pack (ENABLED)
English (GB) Language Pack (disabled)
English (South Africa) Language Pack (disabled)

I've disabled the last two entries myself, just to see if it makes any difference, and it doesn't.
Interesting to notice that in Windows, Firefox doesn't have the Languages section in the Add-ons Manager page.

Preferences -> Content -> Languages -> Choose, shows, in this order:

Code:

[it-it]
Italian [it]
English/USA
English [en]

So, I think my settings are right. After all it's a brand new installation of Xubuntu.
Moreover, my IP returns a geolocation which various websites confirm it's in Italy.

Problem and steps to reproduce

On "Clear recent history" I delete everything.
I visit www.youtube.com or even https://www.youtube.com/?hl=it&gl=IT.
YouTube is still in english, while the content it provides is correctly focused on Italy; a message says:
"You're viewing YouTube in English (US). You can change this preference below."

I could just do that; the problem is that:
1) I delete cookies all the time, so I'll have to do that everytime;
2) On Windows it doesn't happen, so it looks like some kind of bug to me, specific with Ubuntu / Linux.

On Windows 7 64-bit this doesn't happen, doing the same steps; I double checked, but I was sure about it because I used Windows since recently, and in fact I noticed this behaviour immediately when trying Ubuntu.

Last thing I'll add, I'm no expert on about:config, but in it I've found, looking for the keyword lang these two variables: extensions.bootstrappedAddons and extensions.xpiState; their value is full of stuff, compared to Windows, so they may be or may not be the cause, just reporting this.

I don't feel like filing a bug report until I see what more experienced users say about this.

Over to you.

**QIII** · March 11th, 2016

Can this behavior be reproduced using a different browser, such as Chrome.

What you have described thus far does not yet point to Linux. The browser is still a suspect.

**SamInside** · March 11th, 2016

You're right.
I tested Chromium and the problem is not there.
Looks like a bug in Firefox, which for some reason is only present in Ubuntu (or in GNU/Linux OSs in general, I should test that too).

Here it is:
http://osdir.com/ml/ubuntu-bugs/2015-12/msg11059.html
With a workaround that I've just tried and works fine.

**efflandt** · March 12th, 2016

Maybe that will finally resolve an issue I have been having where Firefox spell checker occasionally assumes that I am using the Queens English (en-gb) instead of US English (en-us) even though I made sure that everything on the system and everything else I could find in Firefox was set to en-us. I appears to work for now, because when I just typed "english" it wanted me to use "English" and the dictionary did default to "English (United States)" for language.