1270877 - The initial default search engine should be first in the search order

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P2)

Description

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Looking through the browser.search.order.X settings in the l10n repo:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-central/search?string=browser.search.order&find=\.properties

95% if the time, the search order is only modified to make the defaultenginename the first engine:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-central/search?string=defaultenginename&find=\.properties

This causes unnecessary work and increases the risk of errors.

We should make the explicit default engine the first engine in the order and only change the order if explicitly specified.

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Are you suggesting to consider browser.search.order.X as default, and drop browser.search.defaultenginename?

Fixing this would require going through ~100 repositories, multiplied by each branch we want to update, it's not something we should be doing only because the current status increases the risk of errors. All l10n changes to that file go through approval, and I get an email every time someone change that file. 

Besides, what's the 5%?
https://l10n.mozilla-community.org/~flod/p12n/defaultengine_searchorder/

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

> Are you suggesting to consider browser.search.order.X as default, and drop browser.search.defaultenginename?

No, i'm proposing the opposite.

I'm proposing we drop browser.search.order.X completely for languages that don't actually need it and simply make defaultenginename be the first engine in the browser search order.

But as I look at it more, I guess we have to use browser.search.order because otherwise the engines are alphabetical. There's no "default order" even though the most common order seems to be Google/Yahoo/Bing.

> Besides, what's the 5%?

The 5% are languages that modify the order beyond just inserting the default at the top. It's actually more like 1% - Japan, sweden.

> https://l10n.mozilla-community.org/~flod/p12n/defaultengine_searchorder/

Excellent chart. 

I'm looking into much larger issues around how to do a better job of organizing our search engines, and one of the things I found was that we seem to be doing a lot of work to set the order for specific locales, when most of the time there is a common order with an except of moving an engine to the default.

Trying to figure out if there is a better way to do this.

Comment 3

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #2)
> But as I look at it more, I guess we have to use browser.search.order
> because otherwise the engines are alphabetical. There's no "default order"
> even though the most common order seems to be Google/Yahoo/Bing.

Exactly. And usually we want Google/Bing/Yahoo to stay at the top of the list. 

> The 5% are languages that modify the order beyond just inserting the default
> at the top. It's actually more like 1% - Japan, sweden.

As you noticed Japanese has a completely different setup
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/ja/file/tip/browser/chrome/browser-region/region.properties#l9
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n/mozilla-aurora/ja/file/tip/browser/firefox-l10n.js

As for sv-SE: I don't manage Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, but I'd say that SM is broken (default is a searchengine name that doesn't exist), and TB is wrong (no point in setting Google as 1 is the default is Bing).

> I'm looking into much larger issues around how to do a better job of
> organizing our search engines, and one of the things I found was that we
> seem to be doing a lot of work to set the order for specific locales, when
> most of the time there is a common order with an except of moving an engine
> to the default.

The first step would probably be to centralize the management, and move from there :-)

Comment 4

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Mike, are you planning to work on this?

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Nope. With l10n as it is now (fourx100 repos), this doesn't get much for us.

It will be handled by my other search refactoring