1551891 - Disk is incorrectly spelt disc in Privacy and Security -> Cookies And Site Data

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: en-GB / English (United Kingdom), defect)

Description

[Josh Watson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

Opened preferences, went to Privacy and Security and scrolled down to Cookies And Site Data

Actual results:

Saw the misspelt "disc" in firefox again! "Your stored cookies, site data and cache are currently using 173 MB of disc space."

Expected results:

Disk is spelt disk in UK English - it's a diskette, hard disk drive, solid state disk. A disc is a thin cylinder, for example a CD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc (also OED at least, and common UK usage!)

Comment 2

[Josh Watson]

This is not resolved! This is misspelt, and a really annoying little bug in Firefox.

Comment 3

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Resolved is just a technical detail. When a bug is duped, it's also marked as resolved.

Having said that, I'm not sure how useful it is to dupe a bug against another one that is almost 15 years old, without an explanation.

15 years is a long time in technology, and there's no shame in changing a decision made at the time if the circumstances have changed. If we want to stick with it and "disc", I'd like to have a better understanding on the reasons, and some evidence in support.

For reference.

Microsoft uses "disk"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/language/Search?&searchTerm=disk&langID=262&Source=true&productid=0

Apple doesn't provide such a resource, but uses "disk" at least in their support articles
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/create-a-disk-image-dskutl11888/mac

NI for Ian, who's been maintaining the localization for a while.

Comment 4

[Mark Tyndall]

Bug 273267 Comment 2 still stands - there is plenty of usage of disc (I noticed Argos [a fairly large British retailer] selling "Disc Drives" last year) in British English.

(As an aside, citations based on internet usage should show how they have corrected for the prevalence of American English.)

I won't clear the NI label, in case Ian would like to chip in.

Comment 5

[Josh Watson]

Bug 273267 Comment 2 doesn't really stand any more 'Unfortunately, there's no definitive source to say what is "correct".' - language has moved further from the archaic usage. The main two dictionaries for a language saying something is correct make it correct to me.

Oxford has been updated to say it's disk for computing usages: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/disc

Cambridge agree with disk: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/disk and that disc is something else: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/disc

Writing explained adds more ("when to use disk"): https://writingexplained.org/disc-or-disk-difference

Have a read through results from: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=uk+english+disk+or+disc

Comment 7

[Josh Watson]

Hi,

Unsure why this was closed again @Tilden Windsor? This is still an open issue in a different component - please can you reopen it if it hasn't been fixed?

Thanks

Comment 8

[Tilden Windsor [:A-NEUN]]

Apologies, I misread the comment above, and will repoen accordingly.

Comment 9

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

I'm pretty sure this is fixed for Firefox at this point, although there are still 3 left-overs for SM, TB
https://transvision.mozfr.org/?recherche=disc&repo=gecko_strings&sourcelocale=en-GB&locale=en-GB&search_type=strings&entire_words=entire_words

Comment 10

[Ian Neal]

(In reply to Francesco Lodolo [:flod] from comment #9)

I'm pretty sure this is fixed for Firefox at this point, although there are still 3 left-overs for SM, TB
https://transvision.mozfr.org/?recherche=disc&repo=gecko_strings&sourcelocale=en-GB&locale=en-GB&search_type=strings&entire_words=entire_words

Those are fixed too now.