1715691 - Firefox removes Wikipedia search engine when UI language is changed (and user previously installed it)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[gilward.kukel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. set Firefox UI language to German
2. set Firefox UI language to English

Actual results:

Search engine for German Wikipedia is added by step 1 but removed by step 2 and replaced with English Wikipedia search engine.

Expected results:

Search engine for German Wikipedia should not be removed. I want German and English Wikipedia search engines regardless of the UI language. I can manually add the second search engine but the next UI language change removes one search engine.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Search' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[gilward.kukel]

It seems that when the UI language is changed from language 1 to language 2, the Wikipedia search engine for language 1 is removed, that for language 2 added and those for other languages left alone.

Comment 3

[Jeronimo Torti (Please send NI request to Brindusa Tot)]

Hi gilward.kukel,
thank you for submiting this report. I was able to reproduce it in Windows 10, using Nightly 91.0a1 (2021-06-10) (64-bit) and Release 89.0 .
I set this as Enhancement since it could be intended behavior. Hopefully it will be taken into consideration in the future.
I'll mark this as New for visibility.

Regards,
Jerónimo.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Unfortunately this isn't an easy issue to resolve.

We don't allow search engines with the same name to be installed, since that would potentially incorrectly override the application provided engines and/or confuse the user. Wikipedia is providing the same names for their search engines, hence the clashing. We could change the names for the Firefox provided engines, but then there's the issue of what to change the names to.

Comment 5

[gilward.kukel]

They don't have the same name. They are called "Wikipedia (de)" and "Wikipedia (en)".

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I've been chatting about this a bit, and we've realised it is possibly a regression that happened a year or so ago. Previously, Firefox would have kept both around. Hence updating priority & severity.

Below is some technical info that will be useful for us fixing the bug, it isn't a top priority right now, but we would like to fix it at some stage.

• Previously, because these were effectively OpenSearch engines, you’d get them sticking around (unmaintained) - they’d be installed, and then never removed and potentially not updated.
• Now we install the application engines first, then we install any non-app provided ones from the saved configuration. This was a simplification, and helps to avoid duplicates / out of date application engines.
• To add back functionality to allow those engines to be kept when changing languages, we'd need to do something like:
  • Store the WebExtension locale and ID for app provided engines in the saved config.
  • Allow app provided engines to be installed if they are in the config and not hidden.
  • Decide & implement what happens if the user removes an app provided engine that isn’t in the current set (e.g. is the engine removed permanently, how does “restore default engines” work).

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The case in comment 0 refers to replacing built-in engines, that is expected.
The case we want to fix and that Mark is referring to in comment 6, is when the user installed a specific language for the engine, then switched language in Firefox, and then switched language again. We'll see the engine as built-in and remove it, even if it was previously user installed. We lose the fact that at a certain point the engine was user-installed.

Comment 10

[f0rhum]

In duplicate bug 1880732 above this happens when switching to then back from Troubleshooting mode (Normal FR ->TShoot EN -> Normal FR => custom SeachEngine Wikipedia EN removed).