Where Everybody's Crazy

So today I've been doing work on Songbee, amongst other things; one of the areas I've been looking at is whether or not the Japanese localization of it works properly. It certainly doesn't on Mac OS X. Even if you select Japanese as your preferred language in Mac's System Preferences, the Songbee interface comes up in English. This is counter-intuitive, and means it doesn't work like any other OS X application.

Now it turns out that this is a problem with the Mozilla platform. It doesn't ask the operating system what language the user wants. (Although this isn't hard to do; here's some code which does it.)

It also turns out that this problem has been known about since 2001. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I think if you have important bugs (of course it's important, because it's important to me dammit! ;) sitting around open for six freakin' years and nobody's touching them, something's gone wrong with your bug tracking system. Part of the problem, I guess, is that Mozilla gets a lot of bug reports, and there's enough work to do with triage and fighting fires trying to keep up rather than go look at old stuff. So this is no criticism of the Mozilla project - perhaps the only way old bugs will be looked over will be if someone volunteers for the boring and thankless job of trawling through a very large and very old bug list and working out which ones are still important. But volunteers for boring and thankless jobs are, for some reason, really hard to find...