1463544 - Remove browser.startup.homepage from firefox-l10n.js

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

As part of the move to shipping one Firefox with all locales, we need to eliminate firefox-l10n.js.

Currently zh-CN sets browser.startup.homepage in firefox-l10n.js, to load a URL from chrome://browser/locale/browser.properties

https://dxr.mozilla.org/l10n-central/rev/e73d39ca7cb5cc000ef519078c5a6c7d50d05d83/zh-CN/browser/firefox-l10n.js

This is brittle, and requires ad-hoc workarounds in localization tools to avoid losing that string.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

I think there's a separate issue for this bug which is why we still allow china to have their own homepage. We should be switching them to Activity Stream.

MozillaOnline does their own repack. We control the one that comes from our website.

Comment 3

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Reopening, since bug 721211 made it possible to move this to a standard preference. Technically, we can do this in 65 (because of cross-channel), but comment 2 needs an answer.

Comment 5

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Maybe it's time to just get more creative here. Move the startpage into fluent and query it dynamically for china only?

Do we want this homepage for langpack builds as well? Maybe we hardcode the startpage for zh-cn?

It's funny that we used to use browser.properties for everyone and now we're stuck with China for it...

Comment 6

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Mike Kaply [:mkaply] from comment #5)

Maybe it's time to just get more creative here. Move the startpage into fluent and query it dynamically for china only?

I disagree, this really shouldn't be exposed for localization as a string, it would have the same problems described in the dupe I've just filed.

• The string can be removed by mistake, as it happened in the past.
• The localization team is not a stakeholder in this choice (see bug 1590128 for a recent conversation).
• It forces us to constantly write one-off exceptions in our toolchain (serializer in Pontoon, but also any other update script running on l10n repositories for maintenance).

All these remain valid in a Fluent scenario.

Comment 7

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

So maybe we just hard code it for the zh-CN build and language packs using zh-CN get the new homepage?

Comment 8

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Yes.

Preferably, though, I'd like to see an infrastructure that allows for more general localized prefs. Flod went through and cleaned up Firefox a good deal, which leaves us with font preferences for zh-TW, a couple of local TLD suffixes, and the home page here.

https://dxr.mozilla.org/l10n-central/search?q=pref+file%3Afirefox-l10n.js&redirect=false