240501 - META: Bugs that prevent Mozilla from gaining acceptance in the Israeli market

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, defect)

Description

[Prognathous]

The regular reasons apply here (e.g. IE6 is pre-installed by default), but there
are other, more local, problems that seem to have a vast impact on Mozilla's
market share:

BiDi issues:
Bug 85420 - "Need Bidi UI"
Bug 96057 - "Paragraph directionality control UI in Composer"
Bug 98160 - "Can't change alignment/directionality in a textarea"
Bug 73251 - "Hyphen/Minus and numbers switch places (Hyphen appears to
the left, instead of to the right in HebrewLetter+HyphenMinus+Number
sequences)" ('...has the stock exchange market gone up or down?')
Bug 149796 - "Better default fonts for Hebrew" (by default, Mozilla uses a
Serif font. Some users think it looks outdated, but virtually all of them
agree it's illegible for Hebrew texts)
Bug 207186 - "Moving the caret in BiDi texts is buggy, especially in right-to-
left forms" (my old habit of editing text in notepad.exe, then copying it 
into Mozilla, cannot be suggested as a reasonable workaround for most IE users)
Bug 229367 - "Punctuation marks appear in the wrong side of embedded
sections with opposite direction" (this bug may be marked as INVALID, but
expecting users to type arcane control characters to fix this unexpected
Mozilla behavior is definitely *NOT* valid)

Compatibility with dozens of IE-only top-tier websites:
Bug 229877 - "implement Internet Explorer DOM features with a whitelist
(site manager)". We can't expect many users to stick with Mozilla when
they have such a hard time accessing their favorite websites (including
their online bank account, web-stores, information websites - maps,
yellowpages, public transportation information and so on)

- to be continued -

Spamwise, it's probably better that I don't add these bugs as dependencies, 
but I find it important to have one bug that keeps track of them.

Prog.

Comment 1

[Tsahi Asher]

re: bug 229877, it's not specific to hebrew/israel, although ignoring mozilla
may be more wide spread in israel for historic reasons. in the past i was also
afraid the lack of support for IE-DOM will block the usage of mozilla, but from
what i see, it does not, and we (at least in israel) are succeeding in educating
people that most problems are due to bad web site design, and are not related to
mozilla. it seems to me that despite this bug, mozilla/firefox are gaining
popularity, and as that grows, webmasters will eventually be forced to abandon
the IE specific coding, or at least, add support for Gecko as well.

Comment 2

[Eyal Rozenberg]

I suggest:

1. Placing all the listed bugs in the "bug 240501 depends on"
2. Adding bug 174470: "[BC] Bidi : Border-collapse property in RTL direction is
not working correctly" which is really nasty, since many sites in Hebrew use
this, and the feature is not only unsupported but mis-supported, making pages a
mess.
3. Renaming the bug to: "META: Bugs preventing Mozilla from gaining acceptance
in the Hebrew-speaking public" (remember it's not a "market" since we're not
"selling" Mozilla as though it was a commodity, we're talking about a project
and a community - well, sort of, anyway)

Comment 3

[Prognathous]

Tsahi, Bug 229877 is indeed not specific to Hebrew or to Israel, but it doesn't
have to be. What I'm trying to track here, are bugs that have great impact on
the requirements of Israeli users. The fact that this bug also happens to limit
Mozilla's acceptance in China doesn't really matter in this context.

Eyal, I've added the bugs as dependencies. That'll cause a small outbreak of
bugzilla-spam, but it's probably worth it...

I agree that Bug 174470 should belong to this list. If you find other related
bugs with similar significance, please comment.

As for the summary, I'm using the word 'market' in the broader sense (as in
'market share', another term which isn't used solely for commercial products).
I'll let it stay for now, but if others find it misguided I won't insist.

Prog.

Comment 4

[Tsahi Asher]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Tsahi, Bug 229877 is indeed not specific to Hebrew or to Israel, but it doesn't
> have to be. What I'm trying to track here, are bugs that have great impact on
> the requirements of Israeli users. The fact that this bug also happens to limit
> Mozilla's acceptance in China doesn't really matter in this context.

i should have added:
"... which would render this bug unnessesary". maybe there'se a better word for it.

Comment 5

[Leston Buell]

Should bug 236135 be added to the dependency list? This shouldn't be as big a
problem in Hebrew as in Arabic, but i imagine that there are a lot of Hebrew
docs out there which have had word-internal tags inserted in them by WYSIWYG
HTML editors/generators. (I have not actually checked bug 236135 for Hebrew.)

Comment 6

[Shoshannah Forbes]

I am wondering about bug #74880 - can anyone check to see if is fixed with 1.7?
Also, bug #91312 is pretty annoying- althugh I am not sure if it is used enough
to be added here as well. What do you think?

Comment 7

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I am wondering about bug #74880 - can anyone check to see if is fixed with 1.7?

Lists are fixed, blockquotes aren't.

> Also, bug #91312 is pretty annoying- althugh I am not sure if it is used enough
> to be added here as well. What do you think?

I agree it sbould be fixed, but I don't think it fits the description of this
meta-bug.

Comment 8

[Eyal Rozenberg]

Maybe instead of depending on specific RTL layout bugs, this bug should depend
on meta bug 137995: "Layout issues with right-to-left directionality".

Comment 9

[Prognathous]

Addin Bug 248549 - "Add undetected document.all support".

Prog.

Comment 10

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

removing bug 229877 (replaced by bug 248549).

Comment 11

[BMO Automation]

Marking all tracking bugs which haven't been updated since 2014 as INCOMPLETE.
If this bug is still relevant, please reopen it and move it into a bugzilla component related to the work
being tracked. The Core: Tracking component will no longer be used.