828686 - improve text in our error pages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: SocialAPI, defect)

Description

[Laura Forrest]

Let's change this to make it more clear to users that the social provider is down. 

Change to something like "Product Name is currently unavailable. Please try again later." 

For example "Facebook Messenger for Firefox is currently unavailable. Please try again later"

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Just for reference, the current string is:

"Firefox is unable to connect with $PROVIDER right now. [Try Again] [Close This Sidebar]"

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/0faa1d47ea80/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/browser.properties#l416

(while we're making changes here: those social.error.ok strings seem to be unused.)

Comment 2

[Matej Novak [:matej]]

Hey Laura, the string in comment 0 looks good to me. Does that work, or would you like me to come up with some options?

Comment 3

[Laura Forrest]

(In reply to Matej Novak [:matej] from comment #2)
> Hey Laura, the string in comment 0 looks good to me. Does that work, or
> would you like me to come up with some options?

Let's go with that.

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I think "Please try again later." is probably redundant if it appears right above a "Try Again" button. Here' a screenshot of the UI that shows up in the sidebar: http://cl.ly/image/0V3o2e2F3J0E

We don't distinguish "social provider is down" from other issues (like "Firefox has no internet connection"), so that's why neutral language was chosen. The "$PROVIDER is currently unavailable" language seems kind of misleading in the opposite direction, but maybe that's OK since that may be the more common case (and there are other indicators when Firefox can't connect generally).

Alternatively, maybe we could just enumerate the possibilities, similar to what the network error page does (http://cl.ly/image/1M0t1j432j02):

Firefox can't connect to $PROVIDER.
 * $PROVIDER may be currently unavailable
 * Make sure Firefox is connected to the internet

But maybe that's too wordy. I don't mean to bikeshed too much, if Boriss is happy with just "$PROVIDER is currently unavailable" we can go with that.

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

A couple of notes:

* There is an error page shown in flyouts and (soon) chat windows.  These may not have a "try again" button (the flyout doesn't, and chat probably will not in the first instance) - but I doubt the lack of any "try again" hints in these cases is actually a problem.  Also, these windows are small, so a verbose message might have trouble fitting reasonably - ie, the simpler "$PROVIDER is currently unavailable" sounds more appropriate.

* If we tweak the strings here, we should also consider the "title" string - this will end up being shown in the titlebar of the chat window.  Currently this is "Problem loading page" - probably OK, but not ideal.