Comment 5 for bug 249989

Binary package hint: mozilla-firefox

Firefox doesn't interpret locale related environment variables ($LANG and $LANGUAGE) as it should.
I feeded an existing upstream bug report with the following information. You can find it at:
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419176

1) Ubuntu release:
  Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron x86_64

2) Package version:
  3.0+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1
  But this had affected all versions of firefox I've ever used

3) What is expected:
  Firefox should honour the locale hierarchy set in $LANGUAGE, so when the first locale isn't available, the second should be tried, and so on. Extensions should do the same, independently of the choice made by the core application (or not, but personally I'd prefer that way :-).

4) What happens instead:
  Firefox reads $LANG instead of $LANGUAGE to determine the user interface language, among other things. When there isn't a translation/localization for the system's default locale, it defaults to English, no matter what locales are listed in $LANGUAGE.

Steps to reproduce the bug:
1) Run this bash command:
LANG="gl_ES.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="gl_ES:gl_GL:gl:es_ES:es:en_US:en" firefox
Result: Firefox UI is in English. It should be in Galician, but as no localization exist in that language, it should be in Spanish.

2) Run this bash command:
LANG="es_ES.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="whoCares" firefox
(you could run "firefox -UILocale es-ES" as well)
Result: Firefox UI is in Spanish, as long as every extension.