Land localized default top sites

[sarracini]

See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15yLsFBkic5DFUSdbvSFlR3Rzjxqwmizq9EmksK28l6I

We need to figure out the mechanism for using default top sites depending on the locale

…or geo? #2776 (comment)

[tspurway]

• default top sites themselves broken down by locale
• actual assets/icons for all topsites
• json doc mapped by locale, code for localized selection
• 6 top sites per "locale"
• current US list: YouTube Facebook Amazon Reddit Twitter eBay
• current Canada list: YouTube Facebook Reddit Amazon.ca Twitter Netflix
• current Germany list: YouTube Facebook Amazon eBay Gmx.net Reddit
• current China list: Taobao.com Tmail.com Sina.com.cn Jd.com Weibo.com 360.cn
• current "Global" list: YouTube Facebook Reddit Amazon Twitter Instagram

[zbraniecki]

L10n-Drivers team can help you get the list of most popular sites per locale if you'd like to use that to influence the defaults.

[Mardak]

I believe according to mpopova (activity-stream PM), for the initial release, we'll just do US/China/rest; but having a better way than looking at top sites lists to get these 6 for each locale might be better going forwards.

[AdamHillier]

Amazon is listed under "Global" but amazon.com won't automatically redirect to the correct local version amazon.{fr, it, co.uk, jp} so will we (maybe not for 56) have to localise the top sites in a more granular way?

[Mardak]

depends on what's needed for shield beta 56

[Mardak]

Initial verbal example was en-US and de. Blocked on product decision of which exact locales for shield study.

[Mardak]

Development can start to support just en-US and de. Adding more locales or changing sites should be straightforward once the logic is there to support 2 locales.

[mariappopova]

The top sites for 56 will include Tier 1 and Tier 2 countries + default (rest of the world): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15yLsFBkic5DFUSdbvSFlR3Rzjxqwmizq9EmksK28l6I/edit#gid=170333837

UX is currently reviewing and coming up with tippytop/icons for those default sites

[Mardak]

So it sounds like Canada doesn't actually get its own locale (i.e., en-CA doesn't actually exist). This means canadian users who are using en-US will just get the en-US. mconnor has mentioned how search engines get selected based on geo, but that's not something activity stream is doing currently (but could potentially reuse what search has done ??)

[Mardak]

Approach for 56 can probably just grab the locale from Services.locale and later clean up in #2999.

In TopSitesFeed on INIT, use that locale to key into an updated "default.sites" that is an object with keys of locales falling back to a "default"/global list:
https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/blob/master/system-addon/lib/ActivityStream.jsm#L52
E.g., {"en-US":"https://...","de":"https://","default":"https://"}

Would be nice to handle LOCALE_UPDATED too to avoid followup issues like #3000.

[zbraniecki]

Note that we're moving away from thinking about any single locale and in the direction of locale fallback lists. For example, mentioned Services.locale has getAppLocales, getRequestedLocales etc. This is primarily for fallback reasons, but I can imagine how it could be used to fine-tune content selection in the future - ["en-GB", "fr-CA", "fr"] vs. ["en-US", "de"] for example.

[Mardak]

So in #3004, we're doing Pocket selection by geo and locale. The list of sites have been provided with countries, so that would seem to want to pick things by geo. This would actually make more sense than relying on a non-existent en-CA.

In terms of UI, by default just the hostname is shown, which doesn't really depend on the UI locale, e.g., "amazon.ca" will show up as that for English and French Canadian users.

So assuming we do things by geo, we'll probably need to have ActivityStream.jsm update the default value of "default.sites" and have TopSitesFeed watch for pref changes to refresh?

[Mardak]

I've updated the spreadsheet to be the redirected (https) page https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15yLsFBkic5DFUSdbvSFlR3Rzjxqwmizq9EmksK28l6I

E.g., instead of "youtube.com" it's "https://www.youtube.com/". Basically whatever is loaded after just typing in the domain.

I also added a code section that is copy/paste-able directly into ActivityStream.jsm as used in PR #3022.