Display MSDN content in English

Redirects regional MSDN websites to the en-US original site to prevent annoying translation elements to appear. They also have more current (fixed) content there.

Archived content: This source code is currently inactive and may be outdated or no longer maintained or functional.

Dieses User-Skript wurde durch die Erweiterung English content für Firefox (früher auch mal für Chrome) ersetzt. Diese Browser-Erweiterung leitet Zugriffe auf lokalisierte Seiten verschiedener Anbieter auf das englischsprachige Original um.

When visiting the MSDN library website to read about .NET classes or other developer documentation, outside of the USA or English-speaking regions, you’re served a localised version of the page. This is most prominently visible by the yellow warning bar at the top of the page that notifies you about the translated content. Manual translations are usually well readable. But automatic translations are often mistakable or wrong after a few words already. The selection “show original” is only saved for a limited time.

Even more annoying are the yellow text spans with their popup hiding other text. It appears as soon as you accidently rest the mouse cursor over them. (Ad blockers seem to hide the popup.) I am not here to help Microsoft improve their documentation translation – you’re gonna do that yourself, please. I want to read up something and continue my work with the knowledge I just needed. You can only get rid of these markings by visiting the US website. Fortunately this is very easily possible by replacing the culture code in the URL to “en-us”. This user script does that automatically in your browser.

Additionally, it happened a number of times in the past that the German site had outdated or ambiguous content – even in the English translation. That has led to confusion among the (US-american?) users on the Microsoft forums because they didn’t get to see this error on the website at all. Also in this case, especially if you’re interested in English content anyway, it is better to go to the best-maintained copy of the data.

Download

msdn-english.user.js2.0 KiBClick on “Show Script Source” to see the source code.

This user script is also available on Greasy Fork (the successor of now-dead userscripts.org).

Usage notes

To install this user script you may first need to install an add-on in some web browsers. For Firefox I recommend the add-on Greasemonkey.

Licence and terms of use

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty. (GNU All-Permissive licence)

Statistic data

• Created on 2015-02-01.