Bug 439598

Created attachment 299869 [details]
reproduction

Yes, having en_HK as the my default spellchecking language seems weird to me as
well. Isn't this some byproduct of our effort to unify spellchecking libraries?

Created attachment 299870 [details]
Upstream binary attempt to reproduce

Upstream binary (with a dictionary downloaded to the profile) behaves
reasonably (and it is even translated, although cs_CZ dictionary is not
available yet).

I'm seeing the same problem, fwiw, except with en_ZW as the default (the first
item on my list, just as en_HK is the first on Matej's list.)

Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA.
More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

*** Bug 447435 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 451671 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 447482 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I'm seeing the same problem in F10.... en_ZW is first in the list, so it gets used :-(

Yes, en_ZW is my default value as well.

*** Bug 485343 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

The same thing happened to me with Thunderbird on Rawhide.  The language was ar_DZ, something I've never selected.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 11 development cycle.
Changing version to '11'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

This remains an issue in Fedora 11 with firefox-3.5-1.fc11.x86_64.

While us Americans can work around this issue by writing in the Queen's English, and non-Americans might even prefer if we did, it hardly seems like an ideal solution. :-)

Confirmed on Fedora 11 32-bit running firefox-3.5-1.fc11.i586.
The default language is set to en_HK, the first item in the dictionary list.

Workaround: 1) Learn a foreign language. or 2) Go to about:config and change the value of "spellchecker.dictionary" to your local language code which is quite possibly en_US or en_UK and not ar_DZ.

The workaround correctly sets the spell-check dictionary and persists through a restart of Firefox.

That's interesting. spellchecker.dictionary was indeed set to en_HK. Resetting the value did not fix the problem; it came back after restart set to en_HK again. But manually setting it to en_US did work.

Mine was set to en_ZW on F11 running firefox-3.5.1-1.fc11.x86_64.  I'm fairly sure I never changed the setting, at least not in about:config.  The setting survives a restart after setting it in about:config.

Never mind, I notice that's already been reported.  I've been restoring the ~/.mozilla directory for a few years after each clean install which is probably why mine is the first item on the list from an earlier version.

I'm having this problem in Fedora 12 (with en_HK as the default language).

Set to to en_{HK,ZW} by default on every F12 system that I use Firefox on.

This problem isn't exclusive to Firefox; I'm observing the same thing in Empathy (Fedora 13). I don't know whether that means that there's a common source of the problem, or that it's been duplicated elsewhere.

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still exists in F14 with firefox 3.6.10

*** Bug 699183 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Fedora 15, Firefox 5, bug persists.

Fedora 16, I must reset the spellchecker everyday in about:config.
It's sooooooo painfull and I don't understand why this stupid bug annoying me for years!

Please! Someone can save us?

(In reply to comment #25)
> Fedora 16, I must reset the spellchecker everyday in about:config.
> It's sooooooo painfull and I don't understand why this stupid bug annoying me
> for years!
> 
> Please! Someone can save us?

Did you try to change Spell checking language by: RMB on input field->Languages->[Your preferred language]?
Does this settings persist (this can be found in about:config spellchecker.dictionary)?

Okay!

Despite my change in about:config the language in this context menu was wrong.
I selected the good one and will check about:config in the next days.

Thanks a lot dude!

Today, same bug... :(
The selected language is the first in the list.
I think I will create a new firefox profile, mine is 2/3 years old.

Thanks again!

Same here on Fedora 16 (and previous).  Recently, the list of dictionaries has become apparently completely unsorted, so finding my language is now an extra challenge.  

Also, I keep finding spelling disabled in text fields, so I frequently have to keep re-enabling it ("Check Spelling" via right-click context menu).  I think that part is new as of FF10 - not sure if it's related.

As of four years ago, it was felt that this is not a problem present in upstream.  Anybody know if that's still true, and if so which one of our patches is the cause of these problems?

FWIW (and to get emails) I get the same thing, except that on my machine it defaults to German/Austrian, which I don't speak. It is the first in my list of available languages.

Firefox 10.0.1 on Fedora 15, at the moment. This issue has been going on for a couple of updates of Firefox, and at least one major version.

I keep a second, bare FF profile (no extensions) for temp stuff, and it is also affected.

Looking at prefs.js, the value looks like it's persistent:
user_pref("spellchecker.dictionary", "en_US");
it's there while FF is shut down, but when I start it up, it just seems to reset to null in the list.

Incidentally, I also tried creating a user.js file, with:
user_pref("spellchecker.dictionary", "en_US");

that also gets ignored.

I have a Windows machine in which this gets me crazy.

For instance, when I use Gmail (almost always in Spanish), FF assumes I want it in English and I have to change it everyday. Then I come to write this bug report and FF assumes I want it in Spanish.

So it seems like the wrong choice of dictionary is an upstream issue...

On the other hand, the problem of having tens of dictionaries installed seems to be Fedora's, because here in Windows I only have the dictionaries that I installed by myself.

Still a problem with Firefox 11.0 on Fedora 16. 

For the record, my language resets to de_AT (German/Austria), the first language in the massive unsorted list of available languages in the text field right-click->Languages menu.

Confirming the problem is still present for F17.

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Comment 35 says still present in f17, but the Version field wasn't updated. Reopening.

Most definitely still in f17, saw it just now.

This problem is still present in f18 and ff19

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle.
Changing version to '19'.

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Any progress on this nasty bug?

If I understand the problem correctly hunspell is the one who makes the trouble so why not stop using hunspell and switch over to dictionaries provided by AMO? In that case everyone could decide on his own which dicts he needs and install only the required ones.

This is happening for me as well. I select en-US and Firefox will change it to something else. Right now it has selected English (Zambia). It will also select English (Canada) or some other random English. I only have English dictionary installed, so I guess I am fortunate that Firefox doesn't change to Japanese or Greek. Not that there is anything wrong with those languages if you speak or write them; I don't.

The language to be used should be a USER selection and not something Firefox just decides to use.

Just saw this on F19. Firefox's about:config showed an overridden spellchecker.dictionary value of "en_ZW" rather than blank (or "en_US").

A few notes:

1) This has been so much worse (every hour or so) on f19 that I decided to dig into it a bit.

2) It looks like system-hunspell is configured in xulrunner, not the firefox build, per se.  People here report both thunderbird and firefox trouble, so that makes some sense.  The component may be wrong on this bug.

3) I built a version of xulrunner without system-hunspell on f19 and so far today, it's been stable.  That's a sample size of 1 (2 if you count firefox and thunderbird), so I put the build up here, if anybody else wants to give it a go:

  http://www.bfccomputing.com/downloads/fedora/xulrunner/

(currently uploading on a slow connection - the SRPM is 119243348 long, md5 of d95dd31f5dcabdcff2ec3af8658edb75).  The two changed files are the .spec and xulrunner-mozconfig.

4) It looks to me like perhaps --enable-system-hunspell functionality is buggy upstream.  Assuming others can verify that the mozilla hunspell fixes their issue (I'll write back here if/when it ever goes wrong on my machines), it makes more sense to ship upstream hunspell so the apps are usable.  It's been five years and nobody has fixed this, so it may not be all that easy a thing to do.  system-hunspell has been reverted in the past, according to the spec comments.

sorry for the delay - after running for a while, the same behavior returned, even without the system hunspell.  It looks like this is a xulrunner upstream problem.

This issue remains in F20. Please update the version field. It likes Zimbabwean and Zambian English for some reason.

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I believe the problem mentioned in comment 1  has been fixed lately. Problems with "Zimbabwean and Zambian English" is different issue and probably will never be fixed because it can't be. At least on Fedora.

Firefox/Thunderbird in Fedora is using system dictionaries from /usr/share/myspell. Check out it's content. It links various English dialects/locales to en_US or en_GB dictionaries. All this symlinks are created by hunspell-en package. To get rid of them, you can remove hunspell-en and install hunspell-en-GB or hunspell-en-US package according to the locale you want to use.

When Firefox find 'lang=en' attribute on the page where the input is possible it sets dictionary to the first 'en' locale it have in the loaded dictionary list. It's not en-US or en-GB dictionary but this surprisingly Zimbabwean English (list is unsorted). Firefox is doing this because by default no dictionary is installed and user is supposed to download dictionary which they'd like to use. In this case picking the first 'en-whathever' dictionary makes sense, because user know what he wants and actually installed it. 

So there's no way to fix that in Mozilla code because our changes to improve the situation (like some default en-US mapping) is not relevant to them.

Any known workaround for me is:
yum remove hunspell-en
yum install hunspell-en-US
or
yum install hunspell-en-GB
to avoid load of English dictionaries.

Please recheck that above information is correct and issue mentioned in comment 1 is resolved for you that we can close this bug. Thank you.

(In reply to Jan Horak from comment #51)
> When Firefox find 'lang=en' attribute on the page where the input is
> possible it sets dictionary to the first 'en' locale it have in the loaded
> dictionary list. It's not en-US or en-GB dictionary but this surprisingly
> Zimbabwean English (list is unsorted). Firefox is doing this because by
> default no dictionary is installed and user is supposed to download
> dictionary which they'd like to use. In this case picking the first
> 'en-whathever' dictionary makes sense, because user know what he wants and
> actually installed it. 

My $LANG is en_US.UTF-8. And in the Preferences -> Content -> Languages dialog, "en-us" is listed first (presumably having been defaulted from $LANG). So Firefox knows that I want en-US, and it should give me that.

Hm, let me check that Language preference if we can make any use of it.

Wow, 7 years is a really long time.

As far as I know, this problem did not go away.  I believe I had done the same as Jan Horak and removed hunspell-en (and the libreoffice-lanpack-en which depends on it).

What I don't understand is why FF picks Malawi for me.  It is *not* the first dictionary in the list on my system.  I don't know if this is a different bug or if it's the same bug and the fact that it picks the first dictionary in the list for *some* people is a red-herring.

After F22 upgrade, the problem returned and I didn't remember this workaround.  Thanks Jan for reporting it here.

So, this is not fixed and applies to F22 and FF39.

*** Bug 1007653 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Bumping to F22 since it was mentioned that this happens there and I'm pretty sure I've seen it.  I now run firefox-beta most of the time, and since it has only the US English dictionary by default, I conveniently don't see this issue.

Yes, I still see it on F22. I've removed a lot of stuff so that the only dictionaries installed are English-US and English-UK. I set it to US, and every so often it flips back to UK.

Perhaps the long night ends with Firefox 43?  

 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/08cd638ca00d

I haven't tried applying to 42 yet.  If somebody else does a build first, I'll test.

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Just checked this in firefox-47.0-4.fc23.x86_64 and it does indeed seem to be working correctly (finally). With US English, "colour" is marked as misspelled and "color" is not, which is the expected behavior.