1876287 - Show Translate button in URL bar even if web page is in language that appears in user’s preferences

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Translations, enhancement)

Description

[Šime Vidas]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:124.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/124.0

Steps to reproduce:

In Firefox Settings > Language > Website language settings, I have three languages listed in this order: English, German, Croatian.

While I understand both English and German, I still prefer to read articles about certain topics in English, so when I navigate to an article that is written in German, I sometimes want to translate it to English.

However, Firefox’s Translate button in the URL bar is not shown on such web pages.

Example URL: https://www.peterkroener.de/natives-gzip-in-browsern-node-und-deno/

I assume that Firefox does not show the Translate button because I have German listed in my Website language settings. But since I have English listed above German in that list, I may still sometimes want to translate the page to English, so the button should be shown.

For now, I open Firefox’s menu to access the Translate option, but it did take me a while to figure out this workaround, and other users may not find this option and be confused by the button is missing from the URL bar.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! thank you for submitting this issue unfortunately I wasn't able to reproduce the issue using firefox 124.0a1 (2024-01-29) on Ubuntu 22.04. Could you please answer the following questions in order to further investigate this issue

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

Comment 3

[Šime Vidas]

I tested in Nightly with a clean profile, and I can now confirm that the issue occurs because the German language is added to Website language settings.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Navigate to https://www.peterkroener.de/natives-gzip-in-browsern-node-und-deno/
2. Observe that the Translate icon button is present in the URL bar
3. Go to Settings > General > Language, click the “Choose” button. In the dialog, add “German [de]” and move it below your primary language (I assume that’s English).
4. Navigate to the URL from step 1 and observe that the Translate button is no longer present in the URL bar

Comment 4

[Negritas Sergiu, Desktop QA]

Hello! Thank you for the additional steps on how to reproduce the issue. I have managed to reproduce the issue with firefox 124.0a1(2024-02-08), 123.0b8 and 122.0.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 and macOS 12.6

Comment 5

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:gregtatum, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

This is not a defect, but a behavior change. I'll bring it up for discussion.

Comment 7

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

For now, I open Firefox’s menu to access the Translate option, but it did take me a while to figure out this workaround, and other users may not find this option and be confused by the button is missing from the URL bar.

This has been a trade-off on discoverability for users needing translations, and getting in the way and cluttering up the UI for users who do not. It's somewhat hard to get right.

Comment 8

[Erik Nordin [:nordzilla]]

I support the idea of offering the Translations Button in the case that the page language is a supported, preferred language and there is an available translation to a higher-ranked, supported, preferred language.

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I think improved behavior would be the following:

Case 1

Language List

• SupportedLang1
• SupportedLang2

Expected Behavior
Open page in SupportedLang1, no translation is offered.
Open page in SupportedLang2, offer translation for SupportedLang1.

Case 2

Language List

• SupportedLang1
• SupportedLang2
• SupportedLang3

Expected Behavior
Open page in SupportedLang1, no translation is offered.
Open page in SupportedLang2, offer translation to SupportedLang1.
Open page in SupportedLang3, offer translation to SupportedLang1.

Case 3

Language List

• UnsupportedLang1
• SupportedLang2
• SupportedLang3

Expected Behavior
Open page in SupportedLang1, no translation is offered.
Open page in SupportedLang2, no translation is offered.
Open page in SupportedLang3, offer translation to SupportedLang2.

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Particularly with this change, if users do not want to see the translation from their lower-ranked, supported language, then they can disable translations for that language in the settings.

---

Greg, Šime, thoughts?

Comment 9

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

Seems reasonable, and without diving into telemetry, I would assume we have a much smaller fraction of users setting multiple languages. This may even remove the awkward logic around ignore English that we have, since it's always in the list as a second language in non-English locales.

Comment 10

[Šime Vidas]

Sounds good to me.