Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 15, 2017 21:48 UTC (Sat) by bernat (subscriber, #51658)
In reply to: Highlights in Fedora 26 by Creideiki
Parent article: Highlights in Fedora 26

Doesn't by default browsers use OS language? How could it be incorrect?

Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 15, 2017 22:14 UTC (Sat) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link] (3 responses)

"OS language" is not a well-defined term, and it is not at all certain that you want to use the same language for different things.

As an example, I live in Sweden, and my native language is Swedish, but I set LC_MESSAGES and LC_COLLATE to POSIX so I can search for error messages on Stack Overflow and find files with The One True ASCIIbetical File Name Order (TM). However, I quite like local things like the letters ÅÄÖ, decimal commas, A4 paper, SI units, and weeks that start on Mondays, so all the other LC_* variables are set to sv_SE.utf8. On top of that, I run KDE, which has its own system for localisation, and who knows exactly how that works.

It has also been my experience that Swedish translations of web sites, even ones from really huge corporations, are embarrassingly bad, probably because almost every adult Swede can read English so nobody bothers to translate properly. I therefore tell Firefox to prefer languages in the order en-gb, en-us, en, sv-se, sv. Not that it helps, since many sites do geo-IP lokups and present a machine translated "Swedish" page anyway.

Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 16, 2017 6:07 UTC (Sun) by bernat (subscriber, #51658) [Link] (1 responses)

In Linux, "OS" language would be the value of LC_MESSAGES. It seems a safe bet that if the browser display its messages with the value of this variable, the content should also be displayed in this language. This doesn't mean that some users should be prevented to choose something else, like you do.

Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 19, 2017 16:56 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> It seems a safe bet that if the browser display its messages with the value of this variable, the content should also be displayed in this language.

That's been broken on Fedora for a while: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1005640

Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 20, 2017 9:59 UTC (Thu) by kchr (guest, #117707) [Link]

We're talking about the actual language used for GUI messages, not other locale settings. I think that if there should be any assumtions whatsoever made on what language to use as default in your browser, it should be based on the language environment settings the browser run in (LC_LANG, nothing more).

It is most likely to be what the user prefers to read in - any other factors (like location, keyboard layout) are simply not good enough to base a _language_ decision on.

See, a computer user is most likely using its OS with an appropriate language set. If this is not the case, the user is probably using a public computer, which probably has the most common language set based on the actual location and major languages spoken there. Which means no further assumtions needed here either.

Any other case should be considered fringe and not suitable for making these decisions.