1629538 - The Firefox strings from the OS auth dialog doesn't respect the OS language

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: about:logins, defect, P3)

Description

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: windows security strings.gif

[Affected versions]:

• Nightly 77.0a1;
• Beta 76.0b4;

[Affected Platforms]:

• Windows 10 x64;
• Windows 8.1 x32;
• Mac 10.14.6;

[Prerequisites]:

• Have an OS password set.
• Have the Firefox browser in a different language than the OS one (eg: Windows in en-US and Firefox in DE).

[Steps to reproduce]:

1. Open the latest Nightly Firefox browser.
2. Navigate to the "about:logins" page and select a saved login.
3. Click on the "Show Password" button.
4. Observe the "Windows Security" dialog.

[Expected result]:

• All the strings are displayed in the OS language.

[Actual result]:

• The "Verify your identity to reveal the saved password." string is displayed in German and the rest of the strings are displayed in English

[Notes]:

• The issue is not reproducible on macOS. All the strings are displayed in the OS language.
• Attached a screen recording with the issue.

Comment 1

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

This is expected and is an unfortunate limitation of our localization system. We cannot change the system dialog strings for the buttons and other menus that may appear. We would have to also download the locale of the system operating system, and since Firefox users may prefer the language that Firefox is using, it may be considered a bug to display this dialog in the operating system locale.

At this point, this is a "known issue" without a clear path forward. I'll leave this bug open for the time being but it is not planned to get fixed for 76 or 77.

Comment 2

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2020-04-22 at 16.02.03.png

After further investigations, I have noticed that the issue is also reproducible on macOS. I have the OS language set to US and the Firefox Beta 76.0b7 is an Italian build.
I will attach a screenshot with the auth dialog on macOS.

Considering this I will also change the title of the bug to also reflect that the issue is reproducible on macOS and Windows.

Comment 3

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

As comment 1 described, this is mainly out of our control and would require us to download extra langpacks. I'm going to close this bug as wontfix.

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

It think we want to fix this though as I think it is a common problem but I agree on lowering priority. I don't think we should close the bug and lose visibility of it. It seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea to always have the language pack matching the OS locale installed if that locale is different.

Flod, what do you think? Is this something we should ask to be implemented in the localization system?

Comment 5

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] (PM me if request are blocking you) from comment #4)

Flod, what do you think? Is this something we should ask to be implemented in the localization system?

That would require us to:

• Install an additional language pack at run-time for the OS language, and enable it.
• Detect these as special requests, get the localized content for the OS language and not the UI language.

This seems like a lot of work, and I wonder if there are other use cases beyond this one.

From a user perspective, the only one really confusing is macOS, because of the mixed language. Have we investigated if there are any alternatives to own the full message in the auth dialog?

Comment 6

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Technically, there are many options. Ad-hoc: langpacks, kinto (learn from actitvity stream first), vendor l10n-central into m-c.

Before we choose one, we should figure out a few things:

Scope. Do we want to fix just this one? Just gecko ones? Should this apply to the installer? macOS .app .strings? Updater/crashreporter/other daemon? Nightly, Beta, Release, ESR? GV? Thunderbird? KaiOS?

Engineering cost. What teams need to be involved, who needs to develop what? What needs to be maintained?

Operational cost. What does it take to actually run this? Machines, man-power, processes?