Bugzilla

(In reply to Ronald from comment #4)
> Is the diacritics checkbox new? I used to copy all contents to a text editor to work around the issue (which was really annoying). In German, the checkbox is labeled "Akzente" (accents) - which is kinda off imho. Why would I have to check a box labeled "accents" to match äöü as what they are, i.e. regular characters? So, is this a bug that's related to the new checkbox? I don't remember seeing it pre-97.

So to be clear, this was implemented in bug 202251. The diacritics there are really not about different letters, and being able to get all the matches you want/expect based on the input provided should happen without having to type the exact diacritics/punctuation. In general, I would argue that when searching for a word, providing *more* matches is less harmful than providing *fewer* matches - it's impossible for the user to find the additional ones without significant effort, whereas discounting the ones they don't care about is usually easier.

I understand that for you in German these are not "accents" but separate letters. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to make this distinction universally, not even for the same letters. In Dutch, for instance, `ë` is not considered a "different" letter, it's just an e with "trema". French does the same thing, as far as I understand. There are also existing closed bugs for cyrillic (bug 1620826) and finnish (bug 1647335) that complain about effectively the same thing. It isn't technically possible to fix this - you can tick/untick the "match diacritics" checkbox in the find bar to govern the behaviour, because the browser *cannot* know which is the one you want/mean.

If you think the German label is wrong, you are welcome to [file a bug against the German localization](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Mozilla Localizations) and have a conversation with the localizers about a more accurate label. My German is adequate but not sufficient for a discussion around the subtleties of various words for the type of thing that is meant here. Diacritics is also not the most technically correct word in English; it's a compromise for brevity and user understanding (see also discussions on the patch in that bug). Technically, we're talking about unicode combining characters, but that is clearly not what you want to put on a user-facing label, especially not in a location where space is at a premium anyway.

(In reply to Ronald from comment #4)
> Is the diacritics checkbox new? I used to copy all contents to a text editor to work around the issue (which was really annoying). In German, the checkbox is labeled "Akzente" (accents) - which is kinda off imho. Why would I have to check a box labeled "accents" to match äöü as what they are, i.e. regular characters? So, is this a bug that's related to the new checkbox? I don't remember seeing it pre-97.

So to be clear, this was implemented in bug 202251. The diacritics there are really not about different letters, and being able to get all the matches you want/expect based on the input provided should happen without having to type the exact diacritics/punctuation. In general, I would argue that when searching for a word, providing *more* matches is less harmful than providing *fewer* matches - it's impossible for the user to find the additional ones without significant effort, whereas discounting the ones they don't care about is usually easier.

I understand that for you in German these are not "accents" but separate letters. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to make this distinction universally, not even for the same letters. In Dutch, for instance, `ë` is not considered a "different" letter, it's just an e with "trema". French does the same thing, as far as I understand. There are also existing closed bugs for cyrillic (bug 1620826) and finnish (bug 1647335) that complain about effectively the same thing. It isn't technically possible to fix this - you can tick/untick the "match diacritics" checkbox in the find bar to govern the behaviour, because the browser *cannot* know which is the one you want/mean.

If you think the German label is wrong, you are welcome to [file a bug against the German localization](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Mozilla%20Localizations) and have a conversation with the localizers about a more accurate label. My German is adequate but not sufficient for a discussion around the subtleties of various words for the type of thing that is meant here. Diacritics is also not the most technically correct word in English; it's a compromise for brevity and user understanding (see also discussions on the patch in that bug). Technically, we're talking about unicode combining characters, but that is clearly not what you want to put on a user-facing label, especially not in a location where space is at a premium anyway.