473692 - Use "General" as the name in the first tab in Preferences rather than "Main"

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Jose Fandos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090114 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090114 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre

To follow what seems to be the standard in Mac OS X, change the name of the first tab in the Preferences window from Main to General

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click on the Firefox -> Preferences menu under OS X
2. The Preferences window opens with the "Main" tab open
3. That "Main" tab should be called "General" instead.

Comment 1

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

nice catch

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Attachment: fix

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 362057 [details] [diff] [review]
fix

one nit: using an #ifdef as opposed to an #ifndef is clearer, I think.

Comment 4

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Attachment: [for checkin]Use #ifdef

Done!

Comment 5

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Why is this Mac-specific? There's another "General" tab under "Advanced", regardless of the OS.

The German locale also treats "Main" like "General". Not sure what the other locales do.

Comment 6

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Alex, thoughts?

Comment 7

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Or better yet, can we check this in because it has a patch and r+ and file followups? Getting reviews these days isn't always the simplest of tasks ;)...

Thanks gavin!

Comment 8

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I'd rather get it right from the start, as this isn't an isolated change; translators will have to deal with this.

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

This isn't a hard patch to review, so whatever way we decide to go I doubt getting review is going to be a problem!

Comment 10

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>Alex, thoughts?

Two things we are trying to balance:
1) consistency with the surrounding OS
2) consistency with previous versions of Firefox

changing from "general" to "main" on OS X gives us 1 (at the cost of 2). We shouldn't change on other platforms because that doesn't give us 1 or 2.

Comment 11

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

What's your reference on the OS side? Explorer on XP and IE 7 use "General" (in German, though).

Comment 12

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Yep your right, Windows is using the term general as well. (for some reason I incorrectly remembered them using main).

Comment 13

[Simon Bünzli]

OTOH, there's nothing too _general_ about either the startup or the download related prefs, while they're the _main_ prefs to set for the users (as in "most useful"). "Main" just doesn't seem to easily translate into German, being neither adverb nor noun but a prefix...

Comment 14

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Attachment: Simple one-liner. (checked in)

Comment 15

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/9428da59204d

Since this didn't change the entity name, feel free to request approval for 1.9.1.

Comment 16

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Comment on attachment 364728 [details] [diff] [review]
Simple one-liner. (checked in)

Not sure if this is wanted on 1.9.1 or not, but this probably has to wait anyhow until after the beta...

Comment 17

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

What?

Where in this bug is the rationale to not change the entity name?

Please back this out and get a real patch in.

Comment 18

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I changed the entity name: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/af782d5ec362

I don't think getting this into 1.9.1 is worth the trouble.

Comment 19

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Axel, would getting the string change but not the entitiy change on 1.9.1 cause any problems?

Comment 20

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Yes, 1.9.1 is string frozen.

Comment 21

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

That's no proper explanation, as the string freeze isn't an end in itself. If the entity name isn't changed on 1.9.1, what kind of problems does this cause?

I don't want to force this bug to get fixed for 1.9.1, but I'd like to understand that policy.

Comment 22

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

The policy is dead simple. No l10n changes unless it's a blocker.

Comment 23

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Would it affect other locales as a "l10n change"? Would changing the wording in a German string be considered a l10n change by that policy?

Comment 24

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

This discussion has absolutely nothing to do with this bug, thus I'm ending it here. If you have specific questions about string freeze, ask in the newsgroups.

Comment 25

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Erm, you can leave, but that doesn't end the discussion for me, and I don't care enough to start another discussion elsewhere. My question here was why the change from this very bug would be considered a l10n change. If there's no simple answer to this, I suspect the policy needs to be fixed, and if there's no answer at all, I suppose this can in fact land on 1.9.1.

Comment 26

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Why don't you provide rationale to prove your own comment 8 wrong instead?

Just because Gavin reviewed a bad patch doesn't make this a non-l10n-impact patch.

Comment 27

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I don't think there's anything wrong with comment 8. It refers to a patch that introduced a new entity and would thus have had l10n impact. Attachment 364728 [details] [diff] doesn't change the entity name, which is arguably wrong for trunk, but shouldn't have a bad impact on branch, as far as I understand things.

Comment 28

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Comment on attachment 364728 [details] [diff] [review]
Simple one-liner. (checked in)

Removing the approval request for now...

fwiw I thought semantic changes to strings (when they didn't really change the meaning) didn't require an entity change, which is why I didn't change it.

Thanks Gavin for fixing that for me.

Comment 29

[Jesper Kristensen]

This is bad from a user support point of view. Imagine that the Advanced tab is selected, and you are asked to click the "General" tab. Which one should you click? It is ambiguous. Please don't add two buttons/tabs next to each other with the same name and no easy way of telling which is which. We currently have this problem in the Danish version of Thunderbird, and it is rather annoying.

Comment 30

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Requesting blocking and late-l10n because of comment 29 and comment 22.

Comment 31

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Litmus test cases will have to be updated because of this change, nominating for in litmus.

Comment 32

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

(In reply to comment #30)
> Requesting blocking and late-l10n because of comment 29 and comment 22.

Comment 29 _does not_ want this change, are you requesting blocking to remove this change? If so, the change never landed in 3.1/3.5 and there wouldn't be any late-l10n changes? Am I misunderstanding something?

Comment 33

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This doesn't block, and in fact, feels like an incomplete fix that makes a not-horrible situation no more or less horrible.

The correct solution is to actually rethink the preferences panel and determine:

 - should these prefs be in the "Main"/"General" section, or elsewhere?
 - what we should rename "Advanced:General" to in order to avoid confusion

In either case, we can wait for another version, and I'd rather not cause the headache for SUMO and others this late in the game here until we've got a more thoroughly thought through solution.

Comment 34

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Adding uiwanted to put this on my radar for fixing the advanced > general problem.

Comment 35

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Seems like people want this bug to stay open.

Comment 36

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

This bug was reopened but the fix is still in m-c, should it be backed out?

Comment 37

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Oh, and the page info dialog uses the term General as well, not sure if that should affect this in any way...

Comment 38

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

>This bug was reopened but the fix is still in m-c, should it be backed out?

Yeah, let's back it out and later make multiple updates to terminology at the same time to solve the problems beltzner points out.

Comment 39

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Attachment: backout patch

Here's the backout patch, not sure if I have to find a new (third) entity name, not change the entity name at all, or if this is fine (reverting back to the old entity name).

Comment 40

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

This bug's priority relative to the set of other polish bugs is:
P3 - Polish issue that is in a secondary interface, occasionally encountered, or is not easily identifiable.

I'm assuming that OS X users will focus more on the icon than the name, even though the name is technically incorrect in terms of external consistency.

Comment 41

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Probably too late to really do a backout, looking forward to a ui decision on how to do this...

Comment 42

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

This needs to be wrapped up quickly, since 3.6 has a very small development window.

Comment 43

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Being that this landed, and it isn't reasonable anymore to back this out, I'm resolving this as fixed. I'll spin out a new bug with the issues in comment 33.

One of the main reasons to close this out is to at least get this in litmus, maybe even get a user-doc for it as well.

Comment 44

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

user-doc-complete
Articles updated:
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Downloads+window
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Downloads+window+does+not+open
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+does+not+ask+to+save+tabs+and+windows+on+exit
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+has+just+updated+tab+shows+each+time+you+start+Firefox
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/How+to+set+the+home+page
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window+-+Applications+panel
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window+-+General+panel
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window+-+Privacy+panel
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Session+Restore
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Tabbed+browsing
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Unable+to+download+or+save+files
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+Hangs
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+makes+unrequested+connections
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Multiple+tabs+open+when+starting+Firefox