[Firefox] Upcoming OS authentication strings in Firefox

[Francesco Lodolo]

Hi,

Early next week, a set of Firefox strings will be exposed in Pontoon.

These strings are used in the Operating System's authentication
dialog: when the user tries to set a Master Password in
Preferences/Options, or tries to edit/show/copy a password in
about:logins, a dialog from the OS is displayed, asking the user to
authenticate.

This dialog is particularly complex to localize for macOS, since only
a part of the text can be localized. These, for example, are the
strings to edit a saved login:
- Windows: "Verify your identity to edit the saved login."
- macOS: "edit the saved login"

In English, the macOS dialog will say: “Firefox Nightly” is trying to
edit the saved login. But only "edit the saved login" actually comes
from Firefox.

I scraped Apple's TMX files for macOS, and created a page with all
available translations of that dialog. Please use it as a reference
for your translations.
https://gist.github.com/flodolo/363066820b1c821468d9a08853ba509e

You can see a screenshot of the Italian dialog at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately, this won't make things better if there's a mismatch
between the language used in Firefox and in the OS.

Francesco

[Michael Wolf]

Francesco Lodolo schrieb:

> Hi,
>
> Early next week, a set of Firefox strings will be exposed in Pontoon.
>
> These strings are used in the Operating System's authentication
> dialog: when the user tries to set a Master Password in
> Preferences/Options, or tries to edit/show/copy a password in
> about:logins, a dialog from the OS is displayed, asking the user to
> authenticate.
>
> This dialog is particularly complex to localize for macOS, since only
> a part of the text can be localized. These, for example, are the
> strings to edit a saved login:
> - Windows: "Verify your identity to edit the saved login."
> - macOS: "edit the saved login"
>

Hi Francesco,

this OS dialog is not good. There is no OS in Sorbian and all strings
escept this one you mentioned for Windows are in German, the OS language
Sorbians are using; aside from the fact that this dialog is
uncomfortable for users. The dialog is displayed in Firefox so it should
be a Firefox dialog and not an OS dialog.

Regards,

Michael

[Francesco Lodolo]

> this OS dialog is not good. There is no OS in Sorbian and all strings
> escept this one you mentioned for Windows are in German, the OS language
> Sorbians are using; aside from the fact that this dialog is
> uncomfortable for users. The dialog is displayed in Firefox so it should
> be a Firefox dialog and not an OS dialog.

I completely understand the frustration, but as far as I can
understand, it's not possible to have a different solution.

If apps could display their own native dialog to authenticate the
user, without delegating the task to the OS, it would become confusing
for the user, and it might even have security implications.

Note that the problem is not just for locales like Sorbian, which are
not supported by Apple, but it also affects users with the browser in
one language and the OS in another one.

Francesco