1572943 - Add toggle for RTL/LTR in DevTools settings, independent of default browser locale

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Razvan Caliman [:rcaliman]]

Some users prefer to use DevTools in a different writing mode direction from the default browser one.

The DevTools settings panel should expose a setting for toggling this pref instead of having the user know about and navigate to it in about:config to toggle the overall browser RTL/LTR pref which is:

• LTR bidi.direction: 1
• RTL bidi.direction: -1

Comment 1

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

there's a pref intl.uidirection.

I'd still like to understand what the user is asking for.

The tweet states: "I just had a mini panic attack when I opened up the newly downloaded @firefox
Dev Edition and found that the UI was entirely flipped because Mozilla decided that just because I'm in Lebanon I’ll want my UI & Lang preferences to be RTL. "

If the user could provide the bottom (Intl/L10n) section of about:support, we could verify my hypothesis, which is:

The user downloaded a build from our website based on geo. The reliance exclusively on geo is discouraged by W3C and has been raised in bug 1440488 comment 0.

Prior to downloading, Mozilla website did not inform the user which locale has been selected for them. This has been raised in the same bug .

Finally, as far as I understand the user expresses dislike for the directionality, which is based on the locale (language/script/region). But I'm not sure if they speak of UI direction, script direction or both. What confuses me is that they do not bring up the language, just the direction.

I see three possibilities:

• The user sees English localization, but for some reason we organize the UI right-to-left and the user wants the UI left-to-right
• The user sees Arabic localization and does want the arabic language, script and directionality, but they want their UI organization to be LTR
• The user sees Arabic localization and does want the arabic language and script, but written left-to-right (very unlikely)

Comment 2

[Itiel]

(In reply to Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf] from comment #1)

I see three possibilities:

• The user sees English localization, but for some reason we organize the UI right-to-left and the user wants the UI left-to-right
• The user sees Arabic localization and does want the arabic language, script and directionality, but they want their UI organization to be LTR
• The user sees Arabic localization and does want the arabic language and script, but written left-to-right (very unlikely)

I see a fourth possibility:

• A user uses (and expects) RTL localization for the browser's UI, but prefers English & LTR UI for the DevTools, because of complicated technical terms that does not exist (or common/known) in their language. That's quite popular in Hebrew, at least.

That's what Chrome has been doing up until now, for Hebrew. Actually now when re-testing Chrome, it seems they have added an option to change the devtools localization to Hebrew, but the UI is still LTR. This is.. not great for RTL because devtools tends to mix technical terms in a sentence, so this causes the LTR words and punctuation marks to appear in the wrong spot in the sentence, see attached.

Comment 3

[Itiel]

Attachment: Screenshot

See the "הצגת תגובות HTML" above (in the middle column, third checkbox), the "HTML" bit should appear on the left side of the string.
Also in the rightmost column in the third checkbox, the "XMLHttpRequests" causes the two RTL words to swaps places. And so on.