Startup

There are cases where it may be important to understand how Gecko locale management acts during the startup.

Below is the description of the server mode, since the client mode is starting with no data and doesn’t perform any operations waiting for the parent to fill basic locale lists (requested and appLocales) and then maintain them in a unidirectional way.

Data Types

There are two primary data types involved in negotiating locales during startup: requested and available. Throughout the startup different sources for this lists become available, and in result the values for those lists change.

Data Sources

There are three primary sources that become available during the bootstrap.

1. Packaged locale lists stored in files update.locale and multilocale.txt.

2. User preferences read from the profile.

3. Language packs installed in user profile or system wide.

Bootstrap

1) Packaged Data

In the server mode Gecko starts with no knowledge of available or requested locales.

Initially, all fields are resolved lazily, so no data for available, requested, default or resolved locales is retrieved.

If any code queries any of the APIs, it triggers the initial data fetching and language negotiation.

The initial request comes from the XPCLocale which is initializing the first JS context and needs to know which locale the JS context should use as the default.

At that moment LocaleService fetches the list of available locales, using packaged locales which are retrieved via multilocale.txt file in the toolkit’s package. This gives LocaleService information about which locales are initially available.

Notice that this happens before any of the language packs gets registered, so at that point Gecko only knows about packaged locales.

For requested locales, the initial request comes before user profile preferences are being read, so the data is being fetched using packaged preferences.

In case of Desktop Firefox the intl.locale.requested pref will be not set, which means Gecko will use the default locale which is retrieved from update.locale file (also packaged).

This means that the initial result of language negotiation is between packaged locales as available and the default requested locale.

2) Profile Prefs Read

Next, the profile is being read and if the user set any requested locales, LocaleService updates its list of requested locales and broadcasts intl:requested-locales-changed event.

This may lead to language renegotiation if the requested locale is one of the packaged ones. In that case, intl:app-locales-changed will be broadcasted.

3) Language Packs Registered

Finally, the AddonManager registers all the language packs, they get added to L10nRegistry and in result LocaleService’s available locales get updated.

That triggers language negotiation and, if the language from the language pack is used in the requested list, final list of locales is being set.

All of that happens before any UI is being built, but there’s no guarantee of this order being preserved, so it is important to understand that, depending on where the code is used during the startup, it may receive different list of locales.

In order to maintain the correct locale settings it is important to set an observer on intl:app-locales-changed and update the code when the locale list changes.

That ensures the code always uses the best possible locale selection during startup, but also during runtime in case user changes their requested locale list, or language packs are updated/removed on the fly.