Tails

In Tails 0.18, choosing German in tails-greeter => iceweasel has Google configured as the default search engine. No localized Startpage is available. "Startpage HTTPS" is available. Wikipedia is available, while it’s normally only shown in English locales.

Same at least for Spanish and French. Added to 0.18’s and longstanding known issues. Still the case in 0.19.

No localized search engine (from /etc/iceweasel/searchplugins/locale/$LOCALE) is available.

It’s as if the localized search engines were picked when the profile is generated at build time, then used forever: when logged in German, ~/.mozilla/firefox/default/search.json contains "locale":"en-US" and references /etc/iceweasel/searchplugins/locale/en-US, but not its de counterpart. However, there is no search.json in /etc/skel/.mozilla/firefox/default.

Commenting-out pref("general.useragent.locale", "en-US"); in /etc/iceweasel/pref/iceweasel.js, then removing ~/.mozilla/ and starting a fresh Iceweasel gives the intended behavior. But then general.useragent.locale is set to de. ip-check.info still reports a en-US user agent and OS, though, so presumably the Torbutton protections are enough to spoof this nevertheless. Moreover, TBB itself does set this pref to the language chosen at downloaded time, so this should be safe.

This was implemented in branch bugfix/fix-localized-iceweasel-search-engine.

for 0.19.1 and 0.20