939804 - Creative Commons searchplugin is not working

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/beddd6d4bcdf/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins/creativecommons.xml

This searchplugin is not currently used by Firefox en-US, but several locales rely on this file (about 30). We should fix this.

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Maybe this searchplugin is not as broken as I thought. I realized today that Creative Commons has a "beta" Open Search plugin, that after using this URL
> http://labs.creativecommons.org/demos/search/?q={searchTerms}
redirects to
> http://search.creativecommons.org/?q={searchTerms}

Which is exactly the same URL we're using. Problem seems to be the "sourceid=Mozilla-search" part of our search URL.

http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=test&sourceid=Mozilla-search
This shows nothing in the search URL

http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=test
This shows "test", and then I can click on one of the available search methods.

The only bug in this searchplugin's history is bug 421613, so no idea whom we can contact to fix this on their side.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I don't know why other locales are still using this plugin.  We should remove it instead of fixing it, it's legacy cruft at this point.  If individual locales explicitly want to ship this, we can have that discussion.

Taking

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Bryan: can you think of any reason to preserve this?

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to Mike Connor [:mconnor] from comment #3)
> Bryan: can you think of any reason to preserve this?

A question we could ask locales but I'm certainly inclined to think that if we're not seeing much support issues about it not working then we might as well remove it altogether.

Comment 5

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

CCing more l10n folks.

List of locales currently shipping creativecommons.xml on Aurora for Firefox (desktop): as, cy, eo, es-AR, eu, ga-IE, gl, ku, mk, mn, mr, rw, si, ta, ta-LK, te, th, tn, vi, zh-CN, zh-TW, zu.

It would be interesting to know when the searchplugin broke, considering that right now these locales are shipping a non-working searchplugin, and apparently I'm the only one who noticed it.

And to bring up another item we talked about on IRC with Mike. List of locales shipping answers.xml: fa, ga-IE, ku, mk, rw, si, tn, zu. 

My personal take is that these locales took what en-US was shipping at the time, and the situation remained unchanged until now.

We could send a message to dev-l10n to explain that these searchplugins are going to be removed, and to speak up in case they want to keep them (and eventually copy the searchplugin over to these locales).

Some other notes:
* If the searchplugin is used on desktop, is also used on Metro.
* We need to be extra careful with this. One thing is removing the searchplugin from list.txt/metrolist.txt in the locale, one other removing the xml file from en-US (builds breakage).

Comment 6

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Bug 603298 added bing, and removed CC and answers. There's a per-locale bug for all localizations that talks about porting that change, and I expect that the state above is representing those conversations.

CC being broken adds a new argument to those discussions, of course.

Comment 7

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

From what I've seen, comment 5(In reply to Francesco Lodolo [:flod] from comment #5)

> My personal take is that these locales took what en-US was shipping at the
> time, and the situation remained unchanged until now.

This matches what I've observed by looking at an all-locales view of all plugins.  In general, the locales still shipping Answers and CC are using the set of en-US plugins that shipped in Firefox 2.  Some have added a localized Wikipedia, but that's about it.  I would be surprised if anyone is still shipping either of these engines as intentional choices.

Francesco, do you mind posting to dev.l10n to see if anyone has a strong opinion?

Comment 8

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Done
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.l10n/cxpDTCESSzU/CoHtH8mc7OkJ

Comment 9

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Marking as WONTFIX, we'll remove the searchplugin in bug 1068456 once locales are cleaned up.