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How to override Firefox search language settings

I live in Japan, but I really love to have my (Google) search results to be in English. However, every other program out there thinks it knows what I need better than me. 

That exactly the case with Firefox 3 on Mac. It annoyed the hell out of me to get my location detected every single time I do search and search Japanese segment of the web for my English-worded queries. Making changes to my preferred search language in my Google accounts yielded ZERO results. 

But before you go insane, there's an easy solution!

1. Open file: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml in your favorite text editor

2. add <Param name="hl" value="en"/> to the parameters section (if you want english as default language) as well as replace {moz:locale} entries to the required language setting.

See the screenshot.

3. Restart Firefox and enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Browsers, Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “How to override Firefox search language settings”

  1. spam Says:
    August 7th, 2008 at 12:50 am

    Mike
    What is the color schema in the editor ?
    Seems like it's a Zenburn theme from vim

  2. mike Says:
    August 7th, 2008 at 7:58 am

    The theme is downloaded from http://railscasts.com/about - my favorite Ruby on Rails screencasts site. Check out under "TextMate Theme" section on that page.

  3. spam Says:
    August 7th, 2008 at 9:05 pm

    This page doesn't contain section "TextMate Theme".
    Anyway, I'm looking for something similar for XCode & TextWrangler.

    -R.
    ;)

  4. John Says:
    July 20th, 2009 at 5:18 am

    hey Mike —

    just tried this in FF 3.5.1…and success! what joy.

    thanks loads for the fix -

    cheers, J.

  5. WhiteMonkey Says:
    November 1st, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    I'm from the UK, so I just replaced all mentions of "google.com" with "google.co.uk" for the same result (e.g. results in English) plus it makes more sense for European searchers than the .com results which are more US-centric.

    Also, I'm using Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Linux, so the google.xml file was in
    /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/
    just in case anyone else comes here with the same requirements.

  6. FusionData Says:
    April 14th, 2010 at 6:43 am

    Thanks for the tip. I had this problem on a customer's PC and it did keep me from getting german search results. However, there were still problems. It turns out their HOSTS file had several bogus entries redirecting Google to rogue IP's and that was causing them to keep getting reinfected with viruses and spyware.

    Be careful, if you're getting weird behavior like Google searches going through google.de, check your Winsock, check DNS, and check your HOSTS file.

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