Setting Google search language in Firefox 3.5 on the Mac
Posted by Tariq • Wednesday, July 29. 2009 • Category: Tidbits
While traveling around the place I have been highly annoyed at the Firefox search box's default behavior for Google search. While in the Middle East it shows me RTL pages in Arabic. Well you can easily fix this on the Mac!
Just open the file
You should see something like:
We change this to:
You can change this to any language (just change hl's value) or even country specific languages, like en_GB. When you finish editing save the file and restart Firefox (⌘Q). When using the search box you should now only see results in English.
Just open the file
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml in an editor. I normally use vim, so: vim /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml or you could let your OS decide open /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml at the terminal.You should see something like:
...
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
...
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
...
We change this to:
...
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Stop Google from thinking we read anything but English -->
<Param name="hl" value="en"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
...
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Stop Google from thinking we read anything but English -->
<Param name="hl" value="en"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
...
You can change this to any language (just change hl's value) or even country specific languages, like en_GB. When you finish editing save the file and restart Firefox (⌘Q). When using the search box you should now only see results in English.
Wed, 30.12.2009 12:59
Hi Bert, Haven't seen the b ehavior you speak of, I [...]