454890 - Visitors of mozilla.com should be redirected to their preferred language

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

During our German Mozilla meeting we got the information that a lot of people aren't aware of the language selector at the bottom of the Mozilla website because it is mostly off-screen. Further there is no detection of the preferred language which stops the visitor from seeing the website in his/her own language. If they don't have English skills they are doomed and will probably leave the site (and we loose them).

While opening http://www.mozilla.com we should detect the visitors preferred language and redirect him to the website in his/her language (e.g. Mozilla Europe). This will be a big step forward even if the language switcher remains on its current position.

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel (relman team) -> :pascalc]

this is something I would partially agree with because mozilla.com in English is bigger and will always be bigger in content than affiliate sites, so what happens if a german wants to access English content on mozilla.com, let's say the legal or carreer pages? If we redirect people from Japan/Germany/China... going to mozilla.com home page, we need to find a way to let them access mozilla.com/en-US/

Probably a simple redirect would not be enough, maybe we would have to propose to these visitors to continue to either continue to the en-US site or to go to the affiliate site in their language.

Comment 2

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Can't they just use the language switcher? At least for them it shouldn't be much of a problem since they understand the currently shown language.

Comment 3

[Pascal Chevrel (relman team) -> :pascalc]

then the question is to know where we propose the changes, either on mozilla.com or on the affiliates langauge switcher and in the case of Europe, English is for the United Kingdom version of the site. I am tempted to have the choice presented to users in mozilla.com because that's just one place to maintain, instead of having to modify the switcher on all affiliate sites (china/japan/europe).

Comment 4

[Paul Kim]

Just for reference this was discussed (automatically redirecting users to localized content) at length in January 2006. Some useful feedback in the comments here: http://www.numenity.org/blog/2006/01/06/mozilla-com-l10n-sequel/

Comment 5

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Paul, it says that the language selector was meant as a short term solution. And since we are already servering a locaized version of Firefox based on the accepted language of the used browser we could easily serve the page in the right language.

And back when it was discussed the Mozilla homepage was much smaller, the language selector was instantly visible. Now it is below the fold even on my 24" screen

Comment 6

[Paul Kim]

Hey Abdulkadir: I'm not dictating an answer with the self-link to my blog. :-) I just wanted to make sure you had the additional information for context on why things are the way they are now. I think in general, we're very open to continuing to improve the user experience of mozilla.com for everyone who visits.

Comment 7

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Thanks for the information Paul. It's indeed not easy to decide what to do but IMO we should redirect if the URL doesn't contain a locale. As an example you can see that already when opening http://www.mozilla.com/products/firefox/. You will be automatically redirected to the preferred language, in my case to Mozilla Europe. Why we cannot also do that with the homepage?

Comment 8

[Fernando Pereira Silveira]

it would be great if the preferred user language was saved on a cookie, so even if the user opens a link like mozilla.com/en-US/firefox he's redirected to his preferred language equivalent (if there is some)

Comment 9

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Closing old Mozilla.org website bugs due to them not being relevant to the new Python-based Bedrock system. Re-open if this is a critical bug and should be resolved on the new system too.

Comment 10

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Fixed years ago, I believe.