382551 - Localised builds are not easily accesible or intelligently detected

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 457928

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

Description

[Dwayne Bailey]

Afrikaans Fx2004 has just become and official release.  Yet there are two issues that make it difficult for us to promote its adaption.

1) If you browse to mozilla.com the download widget displays English regardlesss if your accept languages is set to Afrikaans.   Only by changing the useragent.locale could I get the page to offer me an Afrikaans download.  Certainly in South Africa nobody will have that set to AF.  They might have changed their accept lang, although most people won't

2) Since most people won't change any language settings in South Africa it would be nice to be able to point to e.g. mozilla.com/af an easy URL to give in PR or to say on the radio.  The widget then would detect the platform.  Now we have to tell people to go to Mozilla.com and then click on available languages and then select Afrikaans.  We're going to lose people because of this convoluted approach.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Right now, you can point people to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html.

These comments make sense to me though, as the link to all.html is not that obvious on  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/.

Both points sound like good comments to the discussion about exposure of localized builds that we're currently having.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

jslater just blogged about the download path, http://www.intothefuzz.com/2007/05/30/getting-scientific-on-getfirefoxcom/, so he's probably interested in the comments here, too.

Comment 3

[Paul Kim]

Adding clouserw -- this *sounds* like something that will get fixed when bug 378677 is addressed, but I'm not 100% sure. 

Comment 4

[Paul Kim]

So bug 378677, when fixed, will route visitors to getfirefox.com or getthunderbird.com to a language-appropriate download page for Firefox or Thunderbird, if one exists for the language the user has set in their browser.

For example, a user with French set as their primary language will visit getfirefox.com and be redirected to www.mozilla-europe.org/fr/products/firefox (rather than the current behavior, which is to send everyone who visits getfirefox.com to en-US).

This fix addresses point 2 in Dwayne's original filing.

Dwayne: if users from South Africa haven't modified their accept language settings I'm not sure we can really do anything with the download button Javascript to offer them an AF version of Firefox. Pascal and Steven Garrity will have more insight on this than me.

We're happy to host a localized set of Firefox pages on mozilla.com/af, as an alternative solution for point 1 above. This will require a fair bit more work, but it's absolutely something we support. Pascal is our web localization guru, and can advise you on the steps needed to make this happen.

Comment 5

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Dwayne, you can use this url to make the AF download more obvious :
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html#af

Maybe we could use getfirefox.com/{locale} addresses which would be redirected to either international affiliates or the above download page. That would be probably the easiest and quickest way to do it :
http://www.getfirefox/af 
would lead to:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html#af

The long term solution is of course to localize Mozilla.com product pages in Afrikans so as that mozilla.com/af displays an afrikaans page.

Comment 6

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

> Maybe we could use getfirefox.com/{locale} addresses which would be redirected
> to either international affiliates or the above download page. That would be
> probably the easiest and quickest way to do it :
> http://www.getfirefox/af 
> would lead to:
> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html#af

This would be an IT request, since those redirects are in the apache config

> The long term solution is of course to localize Mozilla.com product pages in
> Afrikans so as that mozilla.com/af displays an afrikaans page.

Yep.

Comment 7

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

bug 457928 is creating landing pages for all locales which should fix this.