631516 - firefox list dictionnaries as an unordered list which makes hard to find a specific language

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[thierry.vignaud]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b10) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b10) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b10

firefox list dictionnaries as an unordered list which makes hard to find a specific language.
This bug actually exists for years. See attached screenshot.
Languages are mixed up. eg:

English/US
French/Belgique
English/UK
French/France
Breton/France

They should :
1) either be alphabetically sorted with separators
2) sorted and using sub menus / 2 level menus:

eg:
1) sorted:
breton / France
  <separator>
english / australia
english / ireland
english / uk
english / us
  <separator>
french / france
french / morocco


2) 2 levels menu:
   breton -> France
   english -> 
           -> australia
           -> ireland
           -> uk
           -> us
   french
           -> france
           -> morocco


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open the contextual menu by right clicking in a text area (eg: gmail new mail)
2. enable "check spelling" if it's not enabled
2. go into the "language" menu
3.
Actual Results:  
languages are unsorted in a big messy list

Expected Results:  
language should be nicely sorted with separators between languages or should be using a 2 levels menu instead of only one level

This bug exists for years and is very annoyed.
Tested on Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux, ...

Comment 1

[thierry.vignaud]

Attachment: horrible mixed languages sub-menu

Comment 2

[George Carstoiu]

Setting issue to Enhancement but there's a big chance this will not be implemented because it is not very common to have so many dictionaries installed.

Comment 3

[thierry.vignaud]

Yes & No.

Yes it's not that common when using firefox downloaded from mozilla.com

But it's very common to have many dictionaries when using a distro package for firefox.
One single dictionary can bring many slightly different dictionaries.

Eg on fedora, hunspell-en, the english dictionnary package will bring 22 dictionaries to firefox (US, UK, AZ, CA, ...variants).
hunspell-fr will bring 6 dictionaries.
There's really only one french dictionary (others are soft links for different lang_COUNTRY pair (eg: fr_FR, fr_BE, fr_CA, ...)
And there's really 3 different english dictionaries (en_CA, en_US & en_UK), others are just sym-links.
But firefox see 28 dictionaries for just 2 languages.

Same on Mandriva Linux with myspell-en, myspell-fr, ...
This is why I'm raising the importance field back to normal.
(Though I won't fight if you put it again to "enhancement").

Comment 4

[George Carstoiu]

If you consider that strongly that this is a bug and not an enhancement then I will just leave it like this and we'll see what other people have to say about it. Thanks for contributing!

Comment 5

[bjoern.online]

I'm also having this Problem.

Also it would be good if you could disable specific language entries in Firefox.

Right now I'm having 31 Dictionary Entries from which I would need 4 at most (German, Spanish, British English and American English)

Comment 6

[Jeroen Hoek]

Attachment: Screenshot showing the random-order of the dictionaries for two languages

This is a long-standing bug that has bothered me for quite a while. I frequently use the Dutch and English spelling dictionaries in Firefox, but the randomly ordered list always makes me hesitate about which one I should pick, even though I know exactly which one I want.

This is a clean install of Ubuntu. Usually I will add the German dictionaries as well at some point, making the list even more confusing.

Ordering the list by name seems a more than sensible user interface choice.

Comment 7

[israelplanaguma]

I got 59 options for 7 languages -I barely use 4 of them, but still need them for learning purposes. It's a big pain in the butt, many times I just click the first English option I see, which generally follows British orthographic rules -I write American English, so I get annoying red warnings for American spelling. Good luck finding Catalan.

Comment 8

[Andy]

It seems the sorting of languages has been fixed, I didn't see such a horrible mix.
But the issue of too many irrelevant language variants persists.

Mozilla Support has a good answer: https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/1214083

I'm not sure though how permanent that solution is, somewhen the package manager will probably install the symlinks again.

Comment 9

[thierry.vignaud]

Indeed the sorting looks now better.
But, err deleting system files isn't a good idea.
Removing pkgs would be a nicer hint.