Windows and Ireland, is this a bug?

Hi there. I happened to spot a problem with the country detection in Windows, especially Internet Explorer. I would be very surprised if this hasn't been discovered already but I'll explain it anyway since I didn't find anything on here about it.

First of all, install any version of Windows and set it up for Ireland (or try your existing install if it already has Irish regional settings). Now try to view someone's profile in the MSN Member Directory, or install ICQ. In the first case, you will be sent to the South African MSN Member Directory, and in the second case, if you look in the ICQ options the language will be set to "English (South Africa)", and can't be changed.
On the other hand, set your regional settings to "English (United States)" or "English (British)" and you will be sent to msn.com or msn.co.uk respectively. And ICQ will use the correct language too.

It seems to me that Windows is misdetecting Ireland as South Africa! I've tried this on three systems, all of which showed the same problem:
Windows 95 with Internet Explorer 4.0
Windows 98 Second Edition with IE 6.0
Windows XP Professional with IE 6.0

Has anyone else spotted this? Is there any solution to it?

Or is is because I'm using an Italian satellite ISP? (wouldn't think so...)

Nick_oliveri

Anything involving the net, eg msn, icq yadda yadda yadda will give you what it thinks is your current location defaults. And you with the italian sattelite isp! Which i must admit is pretty cool soundin. Try google or something. If it comes up www.google.ie other than www.google.southafrica then im probably completly talking complete and utter ****e.

If I type in www.google.com on my satellite internet it will redirect me to www.google.it. If I do this on a dial-up modem it will redirect me to www.google.ie.

I wouldn't think this has anything to do with my ISP, ICQ will still set itself to South Africa if you are offline - it seems to detect it from your Windows Regional Settings.

ColmOT [MSFT]

Do you have your user locale and system locale set to English (Ireland)?

Also, IE supports it's own locale settings (which can be different from the system & user ones) via Tools->Internet Ontions->Languages.

If all of these are set to en-ie, then it coul dbe how the websites detect the users locale that's causing the problem.

Yes, all of my PCs have English (Ireland) set up.

Try this:
View my MSN Messenger profile

Look at the MSN logo in the top left of the screen - on all PCs I've tested, it shows msn.co.za (MSN South Africa). Try clearing your cookies if this doesn't show up (this will reset MSN's default language).

Now go to Tools>Internet Options and click the Languages button. Remove English (Ireland) from the list and replace it with English (United States) or en-us. Click OK and OK again.

Now refresh the page and see if the "msn.co.za" is gone. This shows that you're on the US site. If you repeat this with English (United Kingdom) or en-uk it will show msn.co.uk.

I would assume that MSN have a problem with the region detection, only that ICQ gets the language wrong too. I don't think this is an isolated issue.

Dun

Same thing happened me, under Firefox and IE 6. So I guess it's a glitch on MSN's part.

But what about ICQ? Go into Main>Preferences and click Miscellaneous. The language there is detected when you install ICQ, when your regional settings are set to Ireland it chooses South Africa instead.

andrew163

MSN has always done this on me, in every version of windows and every browser ive tried... its a glitch on their end as far as i can tell...

ColmOT [MSFT]

Karsini, I'll ping the MSN guys and see what reponse I get back...

Same thing happened me, under Firefox and IE 6. So I guess it's a glitch on MSN's part.

Dun, Firefox can't even detect that my system is EN-IE, it always says EN-US...so I wouldn't use Firefox as a benchmark...

maxheadroom

Originally posted by ColmOT [MSFT]
Dun, Firefox can't even detect that my system is EN-IE, it always says EN-US...so I wouldn't use Firefox as a benchmark...

Firefox doesn't detect anything, it depends on which localisation pack you have installed. All the English ones are EN_US, mainly because nobody's bothered to localise it to either EN_GB or EN_IE. There's a british english pack here , maybe somebody could fork that and change the locale to EN_IE?

ColmOT [MSFT]

IS that the text when you go to About->Firefox? I thought it was the locale of the system....

My apologies to Firefox if I'm mistaking....

maxheadroom

Yep, that's where you find out. I was confused by it for a long time... then decided it wasn't worth the effort to change it

Capt'n Midnight

[edit] since problem is reproducable - it's a bug / undocumented feature - just have to wait to see what happens * [/edit]

PS. I can understand ICQ - but MSN ?

ColmOT [MSFT]

I've reproduced it on a machine in Microsoft...so I'm waiting for someone from the MSN team to get back to me about it.

ColmOT [MSFT]

I got an update about this and it indeed is a bug in MSN. It'll be fixed in the next update later in the year.

Thanks.

Cool, nice one. I might need to get on to the ICQ team and let them know about this too.

Still, I'm surprised it wasn't found already - I've known about this for a very long time, maybe even a couple of years. I usually just worked around it by manually changing MSN's default language.