1154624 - Provide a cross-platform "Look Up" menu entry that uses wiktionary.org

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

The Mac has a standard "Look Up" context menu item that is used to find the definition of a word in the OS X dictionary. Firefox already supports the standard trackpad gesture and bug 1116391 is about adding the context menu entry. However, we could do even better and use Wikimedia Foundation's wiktionary.org for all of our platforms.

This could work either like the "Search" menu item (opens a new tab with the search results for the selected word) or like the Mac dictionary lookup, with a panel containing the lookup results displayed on top of the page.

The Wikimedia Foundation's mission seems closely aligned with Mozilla's so that the default placement in a Firefox menu shouldn't be a cause of concern, but we would naturally also allow add-ons to switch dictionary service providers.

Comment 1

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

We tried to optimize context menus entries with Firefox 89 (the more entries we have on context menus, the harder specific entries become to discover)
The use case behind this proposal seems fulfilled with the current ability to lookup a text entry with the default search provider. Most search engines return definitions when searching a single word and it seems like having 2 separate entries for "search" and "dictionary" would most of times offer comparable value to the user while always adding one more line item to the context menu, which we know compromises on discoverability of the specific entries. I'll resolve as "Won't fix" since we don't intend to resolve this proposed enhancement.