English content Autor: Yves Goergen

Developer documentation content from Microsoft, published in the MSDN library and more recently the Microsoft Docs website, is offered in many different languages. While this is normally a welcome idea, it is badly implemented by nagging the user with all sorts of changing messages and popups in translated content. Even worse, much of the content is simply machine-translated these days, making it hard to understand and sometimes completely incomprehensible. And even if you're lucky to find old content that was manually translated, it is often out of date and nobody tells you. This has led to misunderstandings in internet discussions more often than not, when I was served a completely different meaning than others that were accessing updated and corrected English content.

This extension fixes all these problems. Whenever it sees you accessing a localised site, it swiftly redirects you to the original content so that you get the most accurate information available. This works for direct access to msdn.microsoft.com/library and docs.microsoft.com, also from web search results, as well as the online help search initiated through the Visual Studio code editor by pressing F1. Redirection is performed quickly before you even reach out to the server for the localised site.

Update: The add-on now also works on the Mozilla MDN web docs at developer.mozilla.org as their translations tend to get out of date as well, sometimes with no warning. Also, the quality of their translations is worse than my English comprehension so I prefer to read the original content.

The only requirement that this extension imposes on you is that you should be able to understand English developer documentation easily. I consider this a necessity anyway. So have fun instead of being confused!