1888469 - Improve wording of the new Clear Data/History Dialog

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Data Sanitization, enhancement)

Description

[aoia7rz7l]

Mostly regressed by bug 1856415, some others by bug 1869884. In any case, I feel like there should at least be an attempt to justify these string changes.

Clear browsing data and cookies

Please don't turn this into another case of bug 1698931. Cookies are also part of browsing data. Chrome's current header is Clear browsing data because its menu option is under More tools > Clear browsing data. Firefox's menu option is currently under the History subview as Clear recent history, so I don't really understand why this was changed.

The "old" Clear History dialog will also says Clear Recent History or Clear All History depending on whether the selected time range to clear is Everything, so you should have at least matched that.

History
Clears site and download history, saved form info, and searches

I had to re-read this a few times to realize that "saved form info, and searches" literally meant "Form & Search History". It's almost like someone can't remove the "history" in "Clears site and download history" part without changing its meaning. Can't really blame them though, the previous string Visited sites, saved form info and searches reads fine and this wouldn't be an issue had they not had to merge download history back into the same option.

Personally, I would have preferred Form & Search History to remain a separate option (bug 1888466) so I don't have much to add here.

May sign you out of sites or empty shopping carts

I kept reading part of this as "May sign me out of empty shopping carts". Whose shopping cart? This feels like a modified string from the "old" Clear Data dialog

[] Cookies and Site Data (0 bytes)
   You may get signed out of websites if cleared
[] Cached Web Content (0 bytes)
   Will require websites to reload images and data

with a "shopping" spin. Not sure why (Shopping and Fakespot comes to mind), but perhaps you should consider how this string looks for downstream privacy browsers like TBB.

Temporary cached files and pages

Yes cached files and pages are temporary.

Clears items that helps sites load faster

Sorry so should I be clearing this or not? Why show the data size when you make it sound like I shouldn't be clearing this. Is Firefox even a privacy browser? Should I even turn off dFPI to make it even faster? I just don't understand how this string actually helps from a privacy standpoint, especially when comparing to the one in the "old" Clear Data dialog.

Site settings
Resets your permissions and site preferences to original settings

What's the difference between site settings and site preferences. I think you need to point me to a SUMO article for this.

Comment 1

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

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

Comment 2

[aoia7rz7l]

Maybe (and this is a very big maybe because I don't know if anyone has already considered this) it would be useful to adopt some of wording from this SUMO article, given that it has remained mostly unchanged in the last 10 or so years? I mean at least the description for Site Preferences makes more sense to a "normal" user when compared to the current label/description in the the new Clear Recent History dialog (except maybe the character encoding part, because we can no longer override text encoding but only "repair" it these days).