1309717 - Centralise search engines used in various locales in mail/locales/search/list.json

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Search, defect)

Description

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

In bug 1276739 Firefox centralised their localised search engines in
browser/locales/search/list.json

Let's do the same for TB in mail/locales/search/list.json.

Attachment 8799848 [details] [diff] has the basic patch but we need a correct list.json, see bug 1309273 comment #7.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Oh, there's bug to get the basic structure on place.

This bug will be used to do the centralising and create a correct list.json.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Attachment: Address flod's comments from bug 1300199

Here are the few fixes you mentioned.

As far as missing locales go, I deliberately left out locales that had the same search engine list as default. Let me know if you think that's the wrong idea.

It's pretty clear that the region.properties is bad when compared to the values in the list.json/list.txt. Lots of missing stuff.

I think Thunderbird pretty much needs a search engine overhaul.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #2)
> Created attachment 8801873 [details] [diff] [review]
Only two lines change, so the initial landing wasn't too bad at all. Thanks for working on it.

> I think Thunderbird pretty much needs a search engine overhaul.
Sadly not the only overhaul we need :-(

Comment 4

[aleth [:aleth]]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #2)
> It's pretty clear that the region.properties is bad when compared to the
> values in the list.json/list.txt. Lots of missing stuff.
> 
> I think Thunderbird pretty much needs a search engine overhaul.

Is there a (non-historic) reason why TB can't simply ship with the same default engines per locale as Firefox?

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

It could ship with the same engines, but not the same search codes, because our agreements only cover Firefox.

The real question is how important it is to have all of these engines in Thunderbird. 

Given that the user only selects a default engine, and the only place that engine is used is when searching on selected text (unless I've missed another search entry point), how important is it that things like wikpedia be available?

We're primarily interested in a good default choice. I'm wondering if we should basically have top three for all of these - Google, Bing, Yahoo or Yandex. Note that lots of these locales don't even have Google available...

Comment 6

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Comment on attachment 8801873 [details] [diff] [review]
Address flod's comments from bug 1300199

Review of attachment 8801873 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Not including locales with the same values as en-US and rely on the default fallback makes sense.

I personally would prefer to use the same order we use in Firefox (default, 2nd, 3rd, rest), but I can live with this.

I honestly tend to agree: most people won't know that you can search on Thunderbird, it's quite hidden, or are not interested in the feature.
In Firefox I would suggest to get data on this feature through telemetry, no idea if that makes sense in Thunderbird.

Besides fixing the mess in region.properties, someone should really look into the list of shipping locales. A couple of examples: we're dropping Belarussian from Firefox * because there's no community, I've never seen a build for ta-LK since I've joined https://l10n.mozilla.org/teams/ta-LK

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/c37a70ed7e13e219d51c5cef1e6d2ff35fd83142

Thanks again, gentlemen. We'll have to open a new bug should we find some resources to look into this further.

Comment 8

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I thought about trying to fix all of the orders in the JSON file, but it seemed like little gain because of how messed up things are.

Comment 9

[Kent James (:rkent)]

(In reply to aleth [:aleth] from comment #4)
> 
> Is there a (non-historic) reason why TB can't simply ship with the same
> default engines per locale as Firefox?

If this question concerns business relationships, Thunderbird has no business relationships surrounding search. Whatever issues there are with search are either technical or that we need to not pretend we are Firefox since they DO have business relationships around search.

Comment 10

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Oops, I never marked this resolved. Landing in comment #7.