Comment 3 for bug 249989

I can confirm it.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) x86_64 here. Default installation of firefox don't use LANG and LANGUAGE environment variables as expected:

 $LANGUAGE contains a list of languages in order of preference, just in case some of the locales aren't available for any given program; if none of them are available, the application should default to "C".

 $LANG contains the default language for the system.

Firefox uses $LANG to determine which language to use for the user interface, which is WRONG, and fails miserably to use the language hierarchy set in $LANGUAGE.

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This actually affects me because:

1.- I prefer to use my system in "gl_ES" (Galician), and if a translation doesn't exists, then try to use "es_ES" or "es" (Spanish, my other mother tongue, much more likely to exist) before falling back to english.
So my
"$LANG" equals to "gl_ES.UTF-8"

and my
"$LANGUAGE" equals to "gl_ES:gl_GL:gl:es_ES:es:en_US:en"

As a "gl_ES" translation doesn't exist yet, firefox reads "gl_ES.UTF-8" and it decides to use the English localization directly.

2.- I worked around this in previous versions of firefox (2.*) by means of a "~/.mozilla/firefox/rc" script where I set "$LANG" to "es_ES.UTF-8", but in firefox 3 this no longer works, so I have to update EVERY APPLICATION I've configured to use firefox so they launch something like "/bin/bash -c 'LANG=es_ES.UTF-8' firefox". This is a pain in the ass ;-).

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Regards.