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!

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

  1. spam Says:

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

  2. mike Says:

    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:

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

    -R.
    ;)

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