Closed Bug 1723362 Opened 4 years ago Closed 4 years ago

"Empfohlen von Pocket" ist heute wieder einmal verschwunden.

Categories

(Firefox :: Pocket, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
Pocket
Version:
Firefox 90
Type:
defect

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: konradphilipp, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

I opened a new tab.
Later I opened the settings.

Actual results:

A new tab appeared, but without "Empfohlen von Pocket".
When opening the settings for the start screen, there was no point for "Empfohlen von Pocket".

Expected results:

A new tab should appear, and one of the areas should be "Empfohlen von Pocket".
In the start screen settings should be the possibility to enable "Empfohlen von Pocket".

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

Component: Untriaged → New Tab Page
Component: New Tab Page → Pocket

Not sure if this is what's happening, but for better or worse, currently this can happen if the browser language and the physical location don't match. Example, DE language browser but physically located outside of Germany. Could that be the issue? Did you maybe move recently but still use the German language browser?

We do this party because of legal concerns, and partly for user experience reasons. Some regions might have laws of restrictions on the type of content we show, and how we show it, so we're careful about what we show and where.
A DE language browser in the UK would be safe from a legal aspect to display UK content, but that currently is all in English, and for user experience reasons we're careful not to show English content to a DE language browser, that might be physically located in the UK. It wold be unexpected and potentially unwelcome.

If it's not that, and you are still physically located in Germany and Pocket stories have stopped, it's possible it's something else happened, and I'm happy to keep looking into the issue.

This can be.
For my user experience you can feel free to drop this "feature", but I am German and now for holiday in Sweden.

There is only left the question why it worked four weeks fine (for me, maybe not from your point of view). I am now here in Sweden for four weeks, the whole time with a DE language browser (only the DuckDuckGo was sometimes switched to Sverige), and I got the whole time recommendations from pocket in German.
By the way, instead of disappearing the pocket I would very much prefer to be asked in which language or from which country I want to get the recommendations. And users for whom it is unexpected and unwelcome always have the chance to disable the whole recommendations.
That only from the user's experience point of view, safe from legal aspects, which I am really and absolutely no expert.

But thank you for helping!
Another "by the way": It was extremely hard for me to find a way to get in contact with Mozilla. There was absolute no contact possibility. And in the FAQ I didn't find it.
I thougt it a bug, and telling Mozilla something about this "bug" was almost impossible for me, at least without an account.

Yeah the delay is likely caused by how often the browser checks the location. It doesn't happen often, and you could likely go any number of weeks before it updates location data. I don't know exactly how often this is, but this timing seems normal based on what you described. Once your back in Germany they should come back in time. If you're interested in getting a little under the hood, there is a way to set the location manually, happy to help with that.

For having an option for users to decide or configure which language or county to get the recommendations, I agree, this has been something we've wanted to do, it just has not yet gotten the priority or go ahead to work on it. There are a few reasons why this is technically challenging so we haven't yet made it a focus. Hopefully we can get to it at some point.

Thanks for reaching out and finding us though. Hope that helped at least a bit, sorry I couldn't be of more help.

I have understanding for al lot of things if I get a chance to understand them. So thanks for explaining! Sounds quite plausible to me ...

As to the going under the hood: Would setting the location manually cause the browser think I am in Germany? Or does the browser then think my language is Swedish?
The first would be great, because then recommendations should reappear.
The second would not help me too much, thinking of my extremely poor Swedish ...

It would cause the browser to think you're in Germany while you travel, including returning Pocket stories, it would not change the language of your browser to Swedish, it would stay in German.

Steps to manually set your location, if you have any issues with these, happy to work through them or provide screenshots for the steps:

  1. In the address bar, type in "about:config", and hit enter.
  2. You should see "Proceed with Caution" text on the page (should be in German for you) and a button that says "accept risk and continue". We're not doing anything weird here and everything we're doing should be easy to reset. There is also a guide here explaining more about this page: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
  3. You should now see a "search preference name" text input, where you can type "browser.search.region".
  4. You should now be able to edit this by clicking the pencil in the right, and entering the value "DE" in the input, and clicking the checkbox.
  5. After this, a restart of the browser is needed, and you should now see Pocket stories on newtab again, this change should last a week before it updates it back to Sweden.

If you want to make the region change to DE permanent, and not revert in a week, you can use the same instructions above but instead of looking for "browser.search.region" and setting it to DE, look for "browser.region.update.enabled" and toggle it to "false". I believe this should lock it to DE, even if you travel.

Hello I have tried to reproduce the issue using Ubuntu 20 and Windows 10 with firefox 90.0, 92.0a1(2021-08-04) and 91.0 but unfortunatelly I wasn't able to do so.
Could you please answer the following questions in order to further investigate this issue?

  1. Does this issue happen with a new profile on the affected version? Here is a link on how to create a new profile: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
  2. Do have any addons installed and if yes could you please list them?
  3. Does this issue happen in the latest nightly version? Here is a link from where you can download it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
Flags: needinfo?(konradphilipp)

@Scott
Great, it worked! Thank you soooo much!
And yes, I think, I can manage to reset this config.

Thank you for helping and have a nice time!

Flags: needinfo?(konradphilipp)

@Negritas Sergiu
Thank you for looking into the problem!
Scott [:the count] Downe was already on the right path - the problem was my DE-browser that is for holiday located in SE.

Hello konradphilipp! Thank you for the reply I will mark this issue as RESOLVED->WORKSFORME as per comment 8.

Have a nice day!

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 4 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
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