1343041 - De-localize about:support's Graphics section

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: General, defect)

Description

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

Localizing about:support increases friction when receiving a user's about:support page during troubleshooting, and generally isn't useful to the lay user on their own.

Comment 1

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

+1. I asked users in a performance survey to paste their about:support and got various languages. For the non-english posts I could not analyze programmatically if they had e10s turned on or not.

Comment 2

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

(In reply to :Harald Kirschner :digitarald from comment #1)
> +1. I asked users in a performance survey to paste their about:support and
> got various languages. For the non-english posts I could not analyze
> programmatically if they had e10s turned on or not.

The JSON output hopefully isn't localized and would be easier to use for analysis btw.

Comment 3

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] (PM if requests are blocking you) from comment #2)
> The JSON output hopefully isn't localized and would be easier to use for
> analysis btw.

Yes, in that case the instructions for the survey asked people somehow to use the button that gives the formatted output and I only noticed that after the survey was already out. I am not sure if I would have caught it as I didn't expect localized output from a "system" page.

Comment 4

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

I strongly disagree.

* That page is quite visible, accessible from the help menu.
* There are support pages pointing to it for the reset feature.
* There's plenty of information that can be digested by non-technical individuals.
* Mixing English and localized text makes the localization looks sloppy. That makes Firefox looks sloppy.
* There's already clean untranslated content in form of a JSON file if you need data from a localized build.

And please don't forget that English represents only 40% of our user base.

Comment 5

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

De-localize all of about:support?  The troubleshooting and applications basics seem to be aimed at non-technical users, as are the crash reports.  Something like graphics section, sure, we could get rid of the localization everywhere, instead of having a mix as we do today.

By the time we're actually getting information from the users that we've asked for about:support content, we've already eliminated a huge percentage of them and are not looking at the representative subset.

Perhaps what we're talking about here is creating a different about: for some of the information and keeping it non-localized, but about:support as it exists today, feels like it should remain localized in the first few sections.

Comment 6

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

Good points. How about just the Graphics section? The Graphics section is really only interpretable by our Graphics team. I would like to not have to spin up a new about:graphics page because of this.

Comment 7

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Jeff Gilbert [:jgilbert] from comment #6)
> Good points. How about just the Graphics section? The Graphics section is
> really only interpretable by our Graphics team. I would like to not have to
> spin up a new about:graphics page because of this.

See point already made in my previous comment:

> Mixing English and localized text makes the localization looks sloppy. 
> That makes Firefox looks sloppy.

I agree with Milan. If you strongly feel that showing that information in English is more useful to the graphics team, splitting such section to a separate about:graphics is the right choice. As a plus, you won't have constraints like blocked uplifts to aurora or beta.

P.S. Core::Localization is not the right place for this bug, but I would like to find agreement before moving it to a better place.

Comment 8

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

I appreciate that a mixture we have in the graphics section feels weird at times.  The method behind the madness is that we have localized things that will make sense to somewhat technical users, and have not localized things that only make sense to Gecko developers.  So, something like "Asynchronous Pan/Zoom" and "WebGL2 Extensions" would be localized; something like "AzureCanvasAccelerated" and the rest of the stuff in the Diagnostics sub-section would not be.

Comment 9

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Moving over to Toolkit General for triage, as that's the right component for about:support.

Alternative thought, this might be a good candidate to convert to l20n once we can use that on desktop, and then we could expose an API to just retranslate this page into English, copy, and retranslate into, say German, and expose all that as a "Copy in English" button.