322492 - Language chooser dialogue box is awkward

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Ed Avis]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Using the language chooser box is very laborious.  Suppose you speak English and Spanish.  Then there are about twenty different language codes to add (Spanish/Spain, Spanish/Uruguay) and so on.  Because the list in the dialogue box is small, if you wanted to move Spanish/Spain to a higher position than the other variants of Spanish you need to press 'move up' lots of times and the selected entry disappears from view.

Suggested enhancements:

Make the dialogue box physically bigger so more of the list of chosen languages can be shown at once.

Don't make the user add every variant of Spanish separately.  It should be possible to add them all as accepted languages in one go.  Perhaps when you choose Spanish this should implicitly include Spanish/Spain, Spanish/Mexico and so on.  Or you may think that it is not necessary to add each and every variety of Spanish to the configuration and that just specifying 'es' will be enough.  If so, this needs to be made clear to the user.

If the many different variants of Spanish, English and French in the list of languages are not really useful and not something that a typical speaker of those languages would need to configure, then just remove them.

A traditional two-panel view with 'add' and 'remove' buttons would probably be an easier way to manage the list.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

The dialog could be better, but I think its a safe assumption that most webservers will just be fine with just es.  Some specific sites might have a country-specific version as well, I really doubt it.  If the spanish localizers didn't add all of these to those builds, I imagine they're not widely used/needed.

Comment 2

[dyno_aus]

The awkward dialog size can be overridden by a custom userChrome.css file

See Bug 283697 - the latest css file makes all the dialogue boxes in Tools -> Options bigger, including the Languages Dialogue.