294299 - "English" not specified as "US"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Max Waterman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-GB; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

On the above web page, the versions of Firefox using English are listed as :

"Language
English                English
English (British)      English (British)"

Please correct it to read :

"Language
English (US)           English (US)
English (British)      English (British)"

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

My guess is 

Comment 2

[Chris Blore]

I believe this is kept as it is because it is the standard 'English' build
produced by Mozilla. The only other official English build is en-GB and
therefore, most English-speaking people will be using en-US and it might be
confusing to list it otherwise.

Comment 3

[Max Waterman]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I believe this is kept as it is because it is the standard 'English' build
> produced by Mozilla. The only other official English build is en-GB and
> therefore, most English-speaking people will be using en-US and it might be
> confusing to list it otherwise.

It's just that it is a little offensive to English nationals to have their use
of their own language marginalised. It could be considered to be 'politically
incorrect', perhaps.

I'm not sure how it could be confusing, since it is making it clearer that
'English' means that used in the US.

Do as you will....I'm sure people have better things to do, even though it's
trivial to change.

Comment 4

[Daniel C]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050811 Firefox/1.0+

Status: UNCONFIRMED -> NEW

Well I guess adding (US) makes it more specific and informative, as it is a US
English build.

Comment 5

[Paul Kim]

Adding Steven Garrity to cc: list. I don't have access to the script that populates the list of language versions that display at http://www.mozilla.com/products/firefox/all.html. 

Steven - This seems like a reasonable request. Can you modify the listing of "English" to "English (US)" here?

Comment 6

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

As I've said before, I'm not happy with this, since it makes it seem that the builds are equal, when in fact the en-US build (which does contain bits of UK English, I think) has had far more testing, etc., and is the base version from which all the others are derived.

(I'm actually less concerned about all.html than the homepage and other more prominent download locations.)

Comment 7

[Paul Kim]

I wasn't aware of this David. Seems like there was good reason for leaving En-US listed just as English. Changing status to Resolved Wontfix.

Comment 8

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

*** Bug 349672 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Daniel Clarke]

I disagree with the statement that "most English-speaking people will be using en-US".

I would volunteer that actually most English-speaking people will be NOT using en-US as their locale.  I'm willing to be that the total number of English speakers using en-GB, en-CA, en-AU, en-ZA, en-IE, en-NZ, etc etc, not to mention all the users in India, is far greater than those using en-US.  

Since most users will NOT being using en-US, it is in my opinion necessary to rename "English" to "English (American)".

Comment 10

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

The real reason this is WONTFIX is comment 6, not what you're disagreeing with.

Comment 11

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until August 27)]

Reopening, we get lots of email complaints about it from end-users. The reason given in comment #6 is not valid from an end-user point of view.

Comment 12

[timeless]

Are end users really reading mozilla.org?

Do you really want end users to think that the en-GB English has equal testing to the en-US version?
It doesn't.

Practically speaking the only point a given en-GB build will have equal testing potentially is a year after its release, at which point there's nothing anyone can do, as the strings are not going to be rev'd. To my knowledge, we do not release newer versions of en-GB in any given release, and note that doing so would probably mess up any traditional signing and versioning we have. (It's not impossible to provide an update using Add-ons, but the user experience for that would probably be fairly strange.)

I'm speaking as someone who is now unfortunately responsible for releasing a mere 16 localized geckos. And there's a big difference between the testing the one used by engineers gets and the testing that the others (which have essentially no engineering testing) get.

An amusing example is that some of our Spanish and French localizations have strings which are totally wrong (well, they're valid Spanish or French, but they do not mean or relate to their context). Unfortunately the only person who would recognize that this is wrong is someone already familiar w/ the Gecko's engineering locale.

It's fairly easy for strings to end up "valid but wrong" in each translation. I know that the mozilla.org translators pride themselves in their work (and I'm very thankful for their help and assistance, as I've needed it in a number of cases), however, translations are translations. Their testing cycles are always delayed relative to the engineering locale (whichever that may be), and without knowing what the engineering locale says, a tester can easily not recognize that a string is "wrong".

Alternatively:
Which would upset your customers more:

"Language
English                English
English (British)      English (British)"

or

"Language
English (US)           English (US) - Official language and release of mozilla.org
English (British)      English (British)"

We could certainly change it to that. If your customers really don't complain about that more than the antebellum state then ....

Comment 13

[Daniel Clarke]

You're missing the point.  The users, myself included, are not interested in the internal testing process.  We don't care which version has had more testing. 
We simply want to see a change in the way the various versions are labelled. 


Of course no-one wants to see:
"English (US) - Official language and release of mozilla.org
 English (British)"

Rather, it would be better to show:
"English (US)           
 English (British)"
 
If you're really that hung-up about "valid but wrong", give me a list of the American English words and I'll translate them into English (I am a Brit living in America so I've plenty of experience).  I'm sure 99% of the changes will be in spelling, not in the choice of words. 

Thanks
Daniel

 

Comment 14

[Robert Kaiser]

This bug is ridiculous. I agree though that the all.html page is suboptimal, as the en-US version does not stick out even though it's the version 50% of our worldwide users want. en-US should be labeled "English (US - international default)" or similar, the click area of it should be larger than for all surrounding languages, and probably that line should even be bolded or the text size doubled, it really should stick out so that people can grab it more easily and see it's our default build for anyone that does not want one of the other, less tested, localized languages.

Comment 15

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Let's be blunt, the en-US strings don't get an in-depth testing beyond the usual eyes, and en-GB is really just a spell-checking fixed derivative of that. The localizer actually intentionally steps in late in the game to catch all fixes in en-US.

en-US is not international default either, the default build you get on getfirefox.com is determined by accept-language headers, and that's good that way.

There's no way in making odd statements on en-US on all.html. It's called en-US, which means that it's about English spoken in the US. If someone wants to use that, that's cool. If not, that's cool.

This is an l10n-drivers consensus, too.

en-US should be called

English (US)

Comment 16

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

I think l10n-drivers has the final call on this, so I'm taking the bug.  I'll change "English" to "English (US)" in the library that affects mozilla.com and mozilla-europe.org and file a bug for the dictionary page on AMO.

Comment 17

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Making sure dbaron is aware of this.

Comment 18

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

This change has landed on the staging server: https://www-trunk.stage.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Comment 19

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

This is merged to production and should be live with our next update.  The AMO dictionary bug is 390394.

Thanks everyone.