Reorganized Firefox preferences (again)

[Michal Stanke]

Hi.

I am supper unhappy with myself when complaining, but I have to make one
complain today - Firefox preferences got reorganized, again... When it
happened for the first time, I knew about that coming before. So after
it got stabilized for few weeks, I expected that it's the desired state
for Photon a dived for a day to refine the accesskey and ensure the most
used preferences have unique accesskey etc. Today I have updated Nightly
and it the preferences are reorganized once again. Do we know, when the
layout and categories are final? I would like to avoid doing all this
every one or two months.
--
Michal Stanke

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 19/07/17 18.41, Michal Stanke ha scritto:

Hi Michal,
I'm not aware of another pending reorg. Having said that, these changes
are the result of user testing and user studies (v1 never shipped
outside of Nightly), so it's hard to exclude that they might change
again in the future (hopefully not shortly).

Francesco

[Tim Chien (MozTW)]

Hi Michal,

As one engineer who worked on the feature, I was frustrated to be asked to
work on the re-org take 2 as well. But hey, I am happy with the fact that
v2 is a much thoughtful design which the entire design team was on board
with. We also get to ship it with Search in Preferences, which helps the
end users to find the things in the new order.

I want to thank you for working on localization on Nightly which definitely
helps us catching internationalization bugs early on.

Here is a question: what can we do to make sure the process is smoother? Do
we need to make the feature roadmap more accessible to the localizers?
Would it be hard for localizers to look at Bugzilla to find out the pending
changes? Let me know your recommendation; I can try to take this to related
job functions.


Tim


On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 12:46 AM, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] <fl...@lodolo.net>
wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> dev-l10n mailing list
> dev-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n
>

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 19/07/17 18.46, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:

> Il 19/07/17 18.41, Michal Stanke ha scritto:
>> I am supper unhappy with myself when complaining, but I have to make
>> one complain today - Firefox preferences got reorganized, again...
>> When it happened for the first time, I knew about that coming before.
>> So after it got stabilized for few weeks, I expected that it's the
>> desired state for Photon a dived for a day to refine the accesskey
>> and ensure the most used preferences have unique accesskey etc. Today
>> I have updated Nightly and it the preferences are reorganized once
>> again. Do we know, when the layout and categories are final? I would
>> like to avoid doing all this every one or two months.
> Hi Michal,
> I'm not aware of another pending reorg. Having said that, these
> changes are the result of user testing and user studies (v1 never
> shipped outside of Nightly), so it's hard to exclude that they might
> change again in the future (hopefully not shortly).

Talking about string changes in preferences: I've seen this morning a
bug that plans to change several strings, switching from "sites" to
""websites" for consistency.

It's one of those edge cases, where you can change only English, or use
a new ID to force all locales to check their internal consistency. The
latter was chosen in this case, and I agree it's the best solution,
after checking how those two words are translated across most languages.

I only hope we can land this change after merge day, and target 57
directly, but it's not clear if that's going to happen. It's also the
first time we anticipate merge day from central to beta, so there's
going to be a lot of learning to do.

Francesco

[Michal Stanke]

Hi Tim.

Thank you for your reaction. I am not disappointed about the result, but
it's more like every time when there is some change made and I have to
do something I have done before once more. To be fair, after I went
through the v2 preferences, there was no need to change any accesskeys
or translations already done before.

I think watching Bugzilla is a bit overkill, until there is some
list/feed containing only bugs that introduce changes in strings.

Michal Stanke

Dne 1.8.2017 v 09:12 Tim Chien (MozTW) napsal(a):

> Hi Michal,
>
> As one engineer who worked on the feature, I was frustrated to be asked to
> work on the re-org take 2 as well. But hey, I am happy with the fact that
> v2 is a much thoughtful design which the entire design team was on board
> with. We also get to ship it with Search in Preferences, which helps the
> end users to find the things in the new order.
>
> I want to thank you for working on localization on Nightly which definitely
> helps us catching internationalization bugs early on.
>
> Here is a question: what can we do to make sure the process is smoother? Do
> we need to make the feature roadmap more accessible to the localizers?
> Would it be hard for localizers to look at Bugzilla to find out the pending
> changes? Let me know your recommendation; I can try to take this to related
> job functions.
>
>
> Tim
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 12:46 AM, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] <fl...@lodolo.net>
> wrote:
>

>> Il 19/07/17 18.41, Michal Stanke ha scritto:
>>
>>> I am supper unhappy with myself when complaining, but I have to make one
>>> complain today - Firefox preferences got reorganized, again... When it
>>> happened for the first time, I knew about that coming before. So after it
>>> got stabilized for few weeks, I expected that it's the desired state for
>>> Photon a dived for a day to refine the accesskey and ensure the most used
>>> preferences have unique accesskey etc. Today I have updated Nightly and it
>>> the preferences are reorganized once again. Do we know, when the layout and
>>> categories are final? I would like to avoid doing all this every one or two
>>> months.
>>>
>> Hi Michal,
>> I'm not aware of another pending reorg. Having said that, these changes
>> are the result of user testing and user studies (v1 never shipped outside
>> of Nightly), so it's hard to exclude that they might change again in the
>> future (hopefully not shortly).
>>

[Tim Chien (MozTW)]

> until there is some list/feed containing only bugs that introduce changes
in strings.

How would that help in this case? I filed the v2 bug (bug 1365133) as soon
as I know the work exists, and it took 3 months to finalize the spec, work
on it, and get a landable patch. Are you saying we should have a feed for
*pending* changes to save you from working on v1 accesskeys which we ended
up throw away? Would that really keep you from working on v1 since that
also means you will be leaving accesskeys in a broken state until v2 is
landed?

Let me know what you think.


Tim

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 01/08/17 10.29, Tim Chien (MozTW) ha scritto:

Let's first agree on "broken accesskeys". While in the past it was
possible to avoid duplicated accesskeys in Preferences (most of the
time), it's now impossible, given the number of strings in each panel.

What Michal did (and I did too) is to go in, check all strings in the
new layout and minimize the number of repetitions (no point in having
the letter C used 9 times, when you can distribute them more evenly).
This work was partially wasted after the reorg v2, since it moved
strings around once again.

For the record, I think nobody did this work for English.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure how we could have minimized the
impact of this change. This sounds like an edge case, something that
hasn't happened in the past on this scale, and hopefully won't happen
again for a long time.

Francesco

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 01/08/17 09.36, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:

> I only hope we can land this change after merge day, and target 57
> directly, but it's not clear if that's going to happen. It's also the
> first time we anticipate merge day from central to beta, so there's
> going to be a lot of learning to do.

And it just landed, didn't realize commit was already on its way
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0f6f2d7421e6

Francesco

[Michal Stanke]

To be clear, I also do think there was probably nothing that would
prevent us from localizing v1 completely, as it should originally land
to release earlier. I do not remember the actual times and dates, when I
started the accesskey deduplication later after the localization was
finished, whether it was before or after v2 reorg was put into a bug.
But if the bug was there before I started this work and I knew about it,
I would maybe wait for v2 to be finished.

Back to the question if the feature roadmap need to be better accessible
for localizers. For v2, I honestly did not know about it. I am watching
what's going around on blogs, but haven't noticed this change or did not
realized what the consequences will be. So if there is some place for
informing localizers prior the changes happen, it would be nice the have
some regularly updated roadmap on the wiki, of a list of well grained
meta bugs from the whole Firefox that one could watch and see coming
changes before they are implemented.

As Francesco mentioned, this is probably a rare case, which is not
likely to repeat until some Australis/Photon level change comes in the
future.

Michal Stanke

Dne 1.8.2017 v 10:38 Francesco Lodolo [:flod] napsal(a):

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 01/08/17 11.43, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:

Another heads up. This just landed
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8d02d9abe10e

It removes closing colon from several strings in Preferences, and sadly
there's no easy way to make this kind of changes without having an
impact on localization, unless we decide it's worth to ignore them (i.e.
avoid invalidating existing translations).

Francesco

[Michal Stanke]

Looking at the diff, the string in
chrome/browser/preferences/preferences.properties got changed without the
id change.

--
Michal Stanke

Dne 8. 8. 2017 13:45 napsal uživatel "Francesco Lodolo [:flod]" <
fl...@lodolo.net>:

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Yes
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1382135#c18

> Looking at the diff, the string in
> chrome/browser/preferences/preferences.properties got changed without
> the id change.
>
> --
> Michal Stanke
>
> Dne 8. 8. 2017 13:45 napsal uživatel "Francesco Lodolo [:flod]"

> <fl...@lodolo.net <mailto:fl...@lodolo.net>>:

>
> Il 01/08/17 11.43, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:
>
> Il 01/08/17 09.36, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:
>
> I only hope we can land this change after merge day, and
> target 57 directly, but it's not clear if that's going to
> happen. It's also the first time we anticipate merge day
> from central to beta, so there's going to be a lot of
> learning to do.
>
> And it just landed, didn't realize commit was already on its way
> https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0f6f2d7421e6
> <https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0f6f2d7421e6>
>
> Another heads up. This just landed
> https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8d02d9abe10e
> <https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/8d02d9abe10e>
>
> It removes closing colon from several strings in Preferences, and
> sadly there's no easy way to make this kind of changes without
> having an impact on localization, unless we decide it's worth to
> ignore them (i.e. avoid invalidating existing translations).
>
> Francesco
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> dev-l10n mailing list

> dev-...@lists.mozilla.org <mailto:dev-...@lists.mozilla.org>
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n
> <https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n>
>

[Jordi Serratosa]

Hi all,

About this reorganization, I can't help but wonder about the usefulness
of accesskeys.
As far as I can see, the reorganization implied taking a bunch of
options that were previously in different dialogs/tabs and shoving them
all together in the same page. Are accesskeys expected to work in this
kind of setting? Does it even make sense to include them?
I have not managed to make them work for Catalan so far (pressing
alt+accesskey does nothing...)

salut,
jordi s


El 19/07/2017 a les 18:41, Michal Stanke ha escrit:
> Hi.

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 08/08/17 18.29, Jordi Serratosa ha scritto:

> Hi all,
>
> About this reorganization, I can't help but wonder about the
> usefulness of accesskeys.
> As far as I can see, the reorganization implied taking a bunch of
> options that were previously in different dialogs/tabs and shoving
> them all together in the same page. Are accesskeys expected to work in
> this kind of setting? Does it even make sense to include them?

I had the very same thought when I saw those huge panels in mock-ups, so
I involved people from Mozilla Accessibility team early on.

The answer was: accesskeys are a mandatory element for accessibility, if
they're present more than one time, you press the key twice and you
still reach the label.

> I have not managed to make them work for Catalan so far (pressing
> alt+accesskey does nothing...)

It's web content, so it has different accelerators (I think Alt+Shift on
Windows?)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-firefox-make-firefox-and-we#w_html-access-keys

Francesco

[Michael Bauer]

They can't be *that* mandatory, since languages not using anything
that's not an alphabet (Chinese, Japanese, Nagari?) presumably don't
have them at all?

M

Sgrìobh Francesco Lodolo [:flod] na leanas 08/08/2017 aig 18:00:

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 08/08/17 19.08, Michael Bauer ha scritto:

> They can't be *that* mandatory, since languages not using anything
> that's not an alphabet (Chinese, Japanese, Nagari?) presumably don't
> have them at all?

Chinese and Japanese usually keep English accesskeys, same for other
languages.

How that affects accessibility for users in those languages (i.e. are
those letters available in the keyboard layout?), unfortunately I don't
know.

Francesco