389825 - Provide specific start page snippets for India

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Websites :: Other, defect)

Description

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

Attachment: graphic showing the snippet we need put on firefox page for users in india

quotin choffman :

"One of the things we learned on the recent trip to India was the importance for
Indian users to get access to the increasing amount of Indian specific content.
 We could improve usability pretty dramatically  for English version Firefox
users in India if we adopted one the snippets from the google search page that
allows easy switching to get at web content from other Indian languages

Check out http://www.google.co.in/ and the snippet for the section that shows

        Google.co.in offered in: Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil

We need to get this snippet added on
http://www.google.co.in/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
This is the page that Firefox users see when starting the browser from any
location inside India

The snippet also needs to be dynamic so that when one of the above languages is
picked as preference then the user can also get back as it works on the google
search page
--->  e.g. when hindi is selected this snippet is shown
     Google.co.in इस भाषा में: English বাংলা
తెలుగు मराठी தமி"

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

My initial comments on this.

We currently have Firefox for pa-IN and gu-IN, both languages are not supported by google so we do not have snippets for those.

We support none of the languages supported by google (Hindi Bengali Telugu Marathi Tamil).

I believe we have plans for an en-IN version and some other indian locales are in the pipe like Hindi.

Google uses accept-language headers to determine which localized version of the google start page is displayed and falls back to english if this is an unsupported language. We should make sure that they do not work differently for the Indian market.

We can create pa-IN, gu-IN and en-IN folders on mozilla.org with the string in English/punjabi/gujarati, the persistence of language choice is done on google's side with a cookie, but we should make sure that if they choose another language from these snippets, the home page is set to our custom page and not the regular google page for the locale.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

To follow up, we don't need to do anything with our 'snippets'.

There is a feature that google offers on their standard google page for folks hitting google from india to select one of the supported Indian languages for the google UI. AFAICT.

Now, for the firefox startpage, they don't offer that.

I guess it's a good idea to have that feature ported over to the Firefox startpage, IMHO, let's get a product opinion and then lobby for it with Google.

Comment 3

[Seth Bindernagel]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Now, for the firefox startpage, they don't offer that.
> 
> I guess it's a good idea to have that feature ported over to the Firefox
> startpage, IMHO, let's get a product opinion and then lobby for it with Google.

It seemed to me that the Google team we met in Bangalore thought adding the snippets to the Firefox startpage would be a good idea. Chofmann, please confirm that.  If so, we can have an internal Google advocate to help lobby with this request.

Comment 4

[chris hofmann]

yes, response to this idea was positive for everyone that we talked with.  The number of people with skills in multiple languages, and the desire to search for content and get search results in those multiple languages might be higher than the general  internet populatation at large around the rest of the world....  hence google's development and surfacing of this feature on the pages they are offering in India.

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

Moving bug over to the www.mozilla.com component for further discussion since this relates to the Firefox start page.  If the www.mozilla.org component is a better place for this, feel free to move it back.

Comment 6

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc]

I just checked, the Telugu and Malayalam snippets are served. We did provide snippets for hi-IN and bn-IN but they are not online. (http://google_snippets.stage.mozilla.com/)

Comment 7

[Paul Kim]

adding david rolnitzky from marketing

Comment 8

[Laura Forrest]

Doing a bit of bug housekeeping here and came across this. 

Closing for now since this was filed years ago. If you think this is still important to fix, and applies to the current mozilla.com and start page snippets through Firefox 4 (that we host), please re-open. Thanks!

Comment 9

[chris hofmann]

yes, still applies for the mozilla.com start page, and/or needs to go into any home page redesign effort.

compare what we are offering to a firefox user starting firefox in India
http://www.google.co.in/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

against the greater utility offered in the stock google search page at
 http://www.google.co.in/

Comment 10

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Firefox Start Page has been changed to the built-in about:home page.