Howdy, I'm running Firefox 21.0 on Fedora 18. I run with an en_US.UTF-8 locale, but have Arabic language support installed (was testing an unrelated bug..). I've noticed that when I start Firefox and begin typing in forms that have spell checking, ALL words are wrong. If I right click and look at the selected language, it defaults to 'Arabic (Oman)'. If I set it to English (United States), it's fine, until I start a new Firefox session. Reproducible: every restart
Can you test it in safe mode (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Firefox_problems) and if the problem persist try an upstream binary from mozilla.com? Thanks.
(In reply to Martin Stransky from comment #1) > Can you test it in safe mode The bug persists in safe mode. > (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Firefox_problems) and if the > problem persist try an upstream binary from mozilla.com? Used: [austin@localhost ~]$ sha1sum firefox-23.0.1.tar.bz2 a2eab7e7ffcb7a02c0a4baed9f7eda3ccbe60d62 firefox-23.0.1.tar.bz2 which does not come with Arabic installed. I installed the Arabic dictionary/language pack, restarted, and the default language remained English. I should note that Arabic was only one langauge in upstream 23.0.1, instead of the few dozen country/language combos. FWIW though, I've had a similar issue with a gentoo FF 22.0 installation, which likes to default to Canadian English instead of US English.
You can get the localized version here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/24.0/linux-x86_64/ or ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/24.0/linux-i686/ but I'm not sure how it's related to this bug.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836882 may be related
This problem exists with English, too. In previous releases, I was always getting reset to English (Hong Kong), but now it seems that English (Zimbabwe) tops the list. This is a rather annoying usability quirk.
Related to Bug #643954
Still happening in F21 beta. However, I did discover an effective workaround if you just want US English: dnf remove hunspell-en hunspell-en-GB Apparently, hunspell-en-US is its own package. You could do the same with keeping GB, of course. If you want one of the other variants, you're less fortunate, but, actually, all of those but CA are actually just symlinks to GB.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 439598 ***