973585 - Give distributions more control over the display of their name (id) in the "About" window

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[e602322]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140130133824

Steps to reproduce:

On Ubuntu: Help -> About Firefox.

Note: it's not the Canonical extension (Ubufox) but rather a Firefox problem as confirmed by Canonical developers (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/418203).


Actual results:

What you see:
* "Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0".

What's wrong with this:
* "canonical" is not capitalized.
* There's no such thing as "Ubuntu canonical", it's simply "Ubuntu".


Expected results:

What you should see:
* Ideally: "Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu - 1.0".
* Still good: "Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu Canonical - 1.0".

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Looking through http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?string=ubuntu&find=&findi=&filter=^[^\0]*%24&hitlimit=&tree=mozilla-central I don't see how this is a Firefox issue. Chris, can you provide more detail?

Comment 2

[Chris Coulson]

We're required by Mozilla to set distribution.id to "canonical". This comes from there

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Mike, I'm tentatively needinfo'ing you. I don't have background on the distribution requirements here, but it would at least seem OK to provide a separate pref (and it seems, by extension, required ini value) that's used for display so that at least it could be capitalized. Is that right?

I'm guessing we want to keep displaying some identifier of the distribution, although I think we could also use a localized string used in case distribution.id exists, roughly of the form "%S by %S" to make this look slightly less awkward (and make the order localizable, rather than the sequential <label> elements that aboutDialog.xul seems to use now). Or is there a particular reason we went for the current solution?

If there's someone else more appropriate to ask about these things, please forward the needinfo. Thanks!

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I agree that the current formatting is pretty awkward for l10n.  We do want to include the distribution ID and version for transparency and support reasons, but it doesn't need to be formatted as it is.

Gijs, if you have a better layout/formatting idea, I'm pretty ambivalent.  As it is, this is pretty trivial, so I wouldn't prioritize it much.