521985 - [de] Choose search plug-ins for Fennec in German

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: de / German, defect)

Description

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

You've indicated an interest in participating in the localization of mobile Firefox (aka Fennec). We want to ship Fennec with a good list of search engines for German. As the technical details of implementation are being worked on, we'd like to start the discussion about the choice of search engines. This bug is about agreeing on a set of search engines, and will not tackle the implementation (at least not yet).

First, the localization team and Staś will look at the market for the locale and come up with a good set of search providers. The guidelines for making recommendations are on https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Mobile/Productization. You're welcome to suggest engines already shipped in desktop Firefox for German, if they fit well in the categories outlined on the wiki.

For en-US, we currently use the following set, which may serve as an inspiration:
Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter.

Note that according to the guidelines, for some categories it may be better to leave them empty than to ship with en engine that's irrelevant or unavailable in your region.

After we decided on a particular search engine, we will need to test it in Fennec. You can test on a mobile device and on the desktop (download the builds from <http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/>). Staś will help with testing on a device, too. If the service works fine, Staś will contact the owner and ask for permission, and for specifics like proper search flags. $name, we'll likely need your help to at least get the contact information if we don't have them already.

We don't know the implementation details yet, so for now, please don't create patches nor land anything. We will keep you posted as we figure out the how's and when's.

Thanks.

Comment 1

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

If it is okay for $name we would like to use the same set as en-US for de ;)

Comment 2

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

You caught me red handed, I guess I shouldn't trust scripts ;)

Kadir: I assume you'd like to localize Amazon, Wikipedia and Yahoo to *.de versions?

Any suggestions for social search except for Twitter (including "no social search at all")?

Comment 3

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

yeah, never trust 'em ;)

You are right, we would like to use the German versions of these services, including Twitter. As sad as it seems, those US-companies completely dominate the German market. At this point I would not include a German social search service, hopefully the situation will be different in 6-12 month time.

Comment 4

[Thomas Schwecherl]

I suggest dict.cc German-English dictionary as additional "search engine" because translations are often needed. dict.cc is community driven and has faster response time than Leo in peak times during the day.

Comment 6

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Attachment: Bootstrapping search engines with Google, localized Wikipedia and Twitter

Here's a patch resetting the mobile/searchplugins/ directory to a minimal set of search engines that we would like to ship your locale with. Please read this comment carefully before you land this patch.

*Important*: There has been a change to how we use the  <Description/> elements present in the plug-ins (see bug 528655 and bug 529869). We want to emphasize that the search is integrated with the browser to better reflect what a search plugin is and what it does. You will need to edit the Wikipedia plug-in before you commit this patch. Please read <https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Integrated_Search_Instructions> for detailed instructions.

For Google and Twitter, we don't have to copy the XML files to your mobile/searchplugins/ directory. Plugins identical to en-US are pulled from source automatically. It's enough to put the engine's name in list.txt for this to work (which I did). I also updated the Wikipedia plug-in to use a bigger icon, see bug 517997 for details.

Please edit the Wikipedia plug-in and commit this patch before you opt-in in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup. Opt-ins without this patch will not be taken. This does not mean that we don't want to include other search engines. On the contrary, the work and the discussion will continue in this bug until we choose a good set of search engines for your locale. Then, you will be able to opt in again, so that in the final release we include more search engines than the mineral set from this patch.

This patch is simply meant to reset your mobile/searchplugins directory so that we keep the repository clean and happy.

Thanks for understanding!

Comment 7

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

I applied the patch and opted in for Fennec 1.0.

Comment 8

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I applied the patch and opted in for Fennec 1.0.

Thanks!

Just making sure: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n-mozilla-1.9.2/de/rev/b4166b4d116d has Wikipedia's description translated, but commented out. Is this how you wanted it?

As for other search engines: we can you amazon.de and yahoo.de, or replace on of them with dict.cc (e.g. yahoo.de, as we already have a general engine: google). In any case, I'd prefer not to go over 5 engines total. Thoughts?

Comment 9

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Thanks for catching it, Stas! I added amazon.de but not Yahoo as it is a niche search engine in Germany. I didn't have time to look into dict.cc so I'll leave it out for now, but a german-english dictionary is definitely something we would want in Fennec.

If you are okay with the folloewing rev I'll take it:
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n-mozilla-1.9.2/de/rev/8f32355a62c1

Comment 10

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

Yep, that looks good. Mind opting in with this rev?

FWIW, I tested dict.cc on an n810 and it looked fine. It even played the voice recordings :) I'll leave this bug open until we decide what to do with dict.cc for post-1.0.

Comment 11

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Thanks Stas, just opted in with this rev. Regarding dict.cc: I'm not yet sure whether that or leo.org would be the better choice, we use LEO in Firefox already.

Comment 12

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Okay, LEO works very well on Firefox Mobile. Let's go with LEO