Zhongwen always shows simplified characters when used with New Tong Wen Tang

[cwfoo]

Steps to reproduce:

1. install the New Tong Wen Tang add-on for Firefox

2. Configure Zhongwen to use the "automatic" setting for displaying simplified/traditional characters.

3. Open a Chinese web site.

4. Zhongwen always shows its pop-ups in simplified characters.

This comment has been edited. Old comment:

If a user has a tool to automatically convert, for example, a page containing traditional characters to simplified characters, the popup will show traditional characters although the page is in simplified characters.

One example of such a tool is New Tong Wen Tang.

From the commit message of 2bd777f:

Presumably there might be users who want to use Zhongwen as a conversion
tool for translating simplified characters to traditional characters. However,
this is not what Zhongwen is designed for. There are specialized tools for
this purpose which do a better job at this and which help the user avoid
seeing both simplified characters on the page and traditional characters in
the pop-up.

I think Zhongwen should attempt to play nice with the translation tools.

N.B. I'm in favour of keeping the option to explicitly select traditional vs. simplified characters, because the characters that appear in the popup are predictable. With auto detection... think of what happens when roughly half the text is in simplified, and the other half is traditional... you don't know what you'll get in the popup...

[cschiller]

Please provide an example for a page where "half the text is in simplified, and the other half is traditional".

[cschiller]

I cannot reproduce this problem.

Here's what I tested:

1. I installed the New Tong Wen Tang add-on for Firefox
2. I configured Zhongwen to use the "automatic" setting for displaying simplified/traditional characters
3. I opened a Chinese web site.
4. When the page displays traditional characters, Zhongwen displays traditional characters. When I switch to simplified characters, Zhongwen displays simplified characters.

As far as I can tell it works as designed.

Can you confirm this?

[cwfoo]

@cschiller In Firefox, I removed both New Tong Wen Tang and Zhongwen, and installed them again through the Firefox Add-ons website. Then, I copied what you did (the 4 steps), but Zhongwen always shows simplified characters:

I tried it on google.com.hk, google.com.tw, baike.baidu.com, and zhihu.com, and the classical chinese texts on ctext.org. There are no exceptions. I will try again on a new installation of Firefox.

Do you think the problem could be caused by old settings that still persist?

[cschiller]

I just tested it again. I went to https://ctext.org/ and switched back and forth between simplified and traditional characters. Zhongwen always shows the characters on the page, so it works exactly as it should.

Maybe there's another add-on that you have installed which is getting in the way?

As for the settings, they are stored in local storage. But there's no setting for "simplified only", so I don't see how that could be the cause. Which version of Zhongwen are you running?

Can you try in a new profile? Like "private browsing" mode?

[cwfoo]

@cschiller I copied the four steps again on another Firefox browser that has never had New Tong Wen Tang and Zhongwen before, and I get the same problem: pop-ups are always in simplified characters.

This time, I tested using zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/, zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/, and ctext.org.

Could it be because of the version of Firefox? I am using Firefox 65.0 on Ubuntu.

[cschiller]

Could you, just for testing, disable all other add-ons and then try again? I just want to rule out that it's another add-on that's causing it.

[cschiller]

Can you also try to change the setting so that it shows both simplified and traditional characters? Does that have any effect or is it still just showing simplified characters?

[cwfoo]

@cschiller

Which version of Zhongwen are you running?

Version 4.21

Can you try in a new profile? Like "private browsing" mode?

Same problem.

Could you, just for testing, disable all other add-ons and then try again?

I deleted all add-ons before doing the tests above.

Can you also try to change the setting so that it shows both simplified and traditional characters? Does that have any effect or is it still just showing simplified characters?

It correctly shows both traditional and simplified.

[cwfoo]

@cschiller Update: New Tong Wen Tang has nothing to do with the problem.
i deleted New Tong Wen Tang, and the problem is still reproducible.

Sorry for the confusion. So the real steps to reproduce are these:

1. Configure Zhongwen to use the "automatic" setting for displaying simplified/traditional characters.

2. Open a Chinese web site.

3. Zhongwen always shows its pop-ups in simplified characters.

I will continue to poke around to see if there are any more new observations. Thank you for your help. In the meantime, I will use an older version of Zhongwen.

[cschiller]

Ah, I'm running version Zhongwen version 5.0.0. Looks like it hasn't been uploaded for Firefox yet.
So maybe it's a bug in the Firefox version 4.21. I'm pretty confident that this issue should be resolved once you upgrade to version 5.0.0.

[cschiller]

I know that the Firefox version was modified so that it would sync its settings across all of your Firefox instances. The Chrome version only uses local storage. So it might be that your settings are somehow messed up and this state is synced to the other Firefox instance you used for testing (if you're logged in, that is).

[cwfoo]

@cschiller

I'm pretty confident that this issue should be resolved once you upgrade to version 5.0.0.

Noted. Will update once available.

So it might be that your settings are somehow messed up and this state is synced to the other Firefox instance you used for testing (if you're logged in, that is).

I don't think this is a problem because I've never used Firefox Sync before.