632264 - about:home hardcodes "Firefox" in its snippets

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Attachment: Replace hardcoded Firefox with branded name in about:home

The snippets in browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/aboutHome.dtd use the "Firefox" name instead of using the branded name.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I don't think we can take string changes. plus we don't usually like inserting entities in strings (that is usually done by provding a prefix and postfix) since it's error-prone for localizers. plus your fix only applies to en-us, any other translation is already using Firefox probably.
Most likely you could want to set the remote snippets url to your own resource, and we can fix this in the next version, if we find remote snippets we don't show the default ones.

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I don't think we can take string changes.

I wasn't expecting that to be taken right now, but i just found out recently, so I just filed the bug with a patch.

> plus we don't usually like inserting
> entities in strings (that is usually done by provding a prefix and postfix)
> since it's error-prone for localizers.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=%26brandShortName; seems to contradict that.

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> > plus we don't usually like inserting
> > entities in strings (that is usually done by provding a prefix and postfix)
> > since it's error-prone for localizers.
> 
> http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=%26brandShortName; seems
> to contradict that.

Ah, then nevermind, I just reported what was said to me, but looks like it was a different context (maybe it was more about having html tags), thanks for pointing that up!

If your patch is not for FX4.0, then you want to change the entity name (just changing the .v1 part to .v2 and replacing in the xhtml page should be fine) so that other locales can notice the change and upgrade their localizations.

Comment 4

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I don't think we can take string changes. plus we don't usually like inserting
> entities in strings (that is usually done by provding a prefix and postfix)
> since it's error-prone for localizers. plus your fix only applies to en-us, any
> other translation is already using Firefox probably.
> Most likely you could want to set the remote snippets url to your own resource,
> and we can fix this in the next version, if we find remote snippets we don't
> show the default ones.

I don't understand wh this would be a stringchange issue.  Stringchange issues have to do with adding new strings.  This would seem to require only replacing a hardcoded Firefox with "&brandShortName;".

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

and that change would only work for en-US, any other branded build using a localization would still have hardcoded Firefox

Comment 6

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

Well,I think the way it is present trademark issues and you should get your legal Trademark protection people involved because people who follow all of the rules to prevent their builds from being identified as Firefox will end up with the about:home page identifying the program as being Firefox.  This could result in Mozilla losing any trademark rights to the Firefox brand.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

distributions are free to change the default homepage, and I guess most of them already do, since I doubt they were pointing at http://www.google.it/firefox previously.

Comment 8

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> distributions are free to change the default homepage, and I guess most of them
> already do, since I doubt they were pointing at http://www.google.it/firefox
> previously.

Speaking for Debian here, I was using about: as a default homepage when google.com/firefox was being used, but now about:home is actually a nicer default (except for the messages talking about Firefox ;) )

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Sure, I'm not saying you are wrong, just that fixing this earlier would have been easier :(

Comment 10

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to comment #9)
> Sure, I'm not saying you are wrong, just that fixing this earlier would have
> been easier :(

Don't worry too much about this, there are many other places where "Firefox" is hardcoded. One more or one less is not making a big difference ;)

That being said, I understand there are downloaded snippets, are these going to contain "Firefox", too ?

Comment 11

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

yes, but the snippets download url is a pref, so you can make it point to a server you like.

Comment 12

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

Comment on attachment 510483 [details] [diff] [review]
Replace hardcoded Firefox with branded name in about:home

Sadly too late for string changes in this release.

Comment 13

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

Comment on attachment 510483 [details] [diff] [review]
Replace hardcoded Firefox with branded name in about:home

You'll need to also rev the entity name to notify localizers of the change.

Comment 16

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

What does revving the entityName look like?

Comment 17

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

even if you change the entity names, the links will still point to Firefox pages (http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/base/content/aboutHome.js#143)

Comment 20

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

This will need to be fixed for the "unbranded Firefox"

Comment 21

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 4 duplicates.
:mossop, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 22

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

DTD doesn't exist anymore, nor the string.