1725170 - Make Firefox Translations more intuitive

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Translations, enhancement)

Description

[campbeak]

Attachment: Screenshot of two pages one with Translation tab working and the other with it not working.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.1.2 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

I followed the steps on "https://mozilla-extensions.github.io/firefox-translations/user/install.html" and then "https://mozilla-extensions.github.io/firefox-translations/user/usage.html" for the first time ever.

macOS 11.5.1, Firefox Nightly 93.0a1

Actual results:

"This page is in [Language] Translate this page? [Translate] [Not Now]" did not appearing for the example urls provided in "https://mozilla-extensions.github.io/firefox-translations/user/usage.html"

https://www.mozilla.org/es-ES/
https://www.mozilla.org/et/

Furthermore, our test page made with Wordpress also didn't display the translation tabs.

Expected results:

"This page is in [Language] Translate this page? [Translate] [Not Now]" should have appeared as it did for the webpage of Tartu Uni (https://www.ut.ee/et).

Comment 1

[campbeak]

Same results for Firefox Nightly version 93.0a1 (2021-08-11) (64-bit)

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

I am able to translate the two pages (https://www.mozilla.org/es-ES/ & https://www.mozilla.org/et/) using the Firefox Translations Infobar. After I set the preference 'extensions.translations.disabled' to false, the mentioned pages are translated if I click on the "Translate this page" icon in the URL bar (see: https://imgur.com/rnFfq2j)

Are you referring to something else?

Comment 3

[campbeak]

Thank you for the link to the image, now I feel a little stupid for missing it.
It also already written on the installation page: "If it doesn't show automatically, click the small translation icon to the right in the URL bar for the translation infobar to show."

However, I'm not the only person in our group who overlooked the explanation and also missed the icon.
The only reason why I tried again with Tartu Uni (https://www.ut.ee/et) was because I could not believe it wouldn't work.

The fact that the preference extensions.translations.disabled needs to be set to false seems to be easy to find, since it is within the instruction steps, and it was brought to my attention by the others that they had changed this setting.

Would it be possible to add the note "If it doesn't show automatically, click the small translation icon [A] to the right in the URL bar for the translation infobar to show." as a new 1st bullet and not a continuation of the first bullet with an image of the icon inserted at [A]?
Why I say this is because I tested on an English edition of Firefox Nightly and therefore didn't read this "Note" to the end since it was not directly related to me (even though the information at the end was crucial to me).
E.g.:

• Press Translate in the translation infobar that pops up
  • Note: If the infobar doesn't show automatically, click the small translation icon [A] to the right in the URL bar for the translation infobar to show.
  • Note: For non-English editions of Nightly, you must remove EN and EN-US from the accepted languages (from the Language section of about:preferences, more precisely from the Webpage Language Settings) for the infobar to show automatically.

Or even better, could it be possible to include it as a step since the example page that is provided needs the icon to be pressed?
(Sorry, but I don't really want to tell everyone that comes back to me to press this icon... Yes I could include it in the email when requesting others to use it, but then this overlooked solution is only solved for the people who I have contact with.)
E.g.:

1. To try out Firefox Translations after installation, visit a page in a language combination that is supported for translation, eg one of:
   • With Firefox Nightly English edition, visit a page in either Spanish or Estonian, eg https://www.mozilla.org/es-ES/ or https://www.mozilla.org/et/
   • With a non-English edition, visit a page in English, eg https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
2. Press the Translation icon [A] to display the translation infobar
   • Note: Depending on the way the web-page is created, this step may not be needed.
3. Press Translate in the translation infobar that pops up
   • Note: For non-English editions of Nightly, you must remove EN and EN-US from the accepted languages (from the Language section of about:preferences, more precisely from the Webpage Language Settings) for the infobar to show automatically.

Comment 4

[campbeak]

Errata:
It also already written on the installation page: "If it doesn't show automatically, click the small translation icon to the right in the URL bar for the translation infobar to show."
Correction: Usage instructions page

Comment 5

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

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

Comment 6

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

The Firefox Translation feature is still a work in progress, I believe some UI changes are planned somewhere in the future. Not sure who is updating the usage instructions pages but I'm setting this to NEW as an enhancement and moving it to the Translation component so that someone with more knowledge in this area could take a look over it.

Comment 7

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

I'm closing as wontfix, since we've integrated the feature directly into Firefox, and the new flow will be released soon.