Look at old pictures of (say) Netscape Navigator. Despite having far fewer pixels we somehow had enough to label our icons. What went wrong?

Globalization happened

English "250 views" = 8 chars wide German "250 mal angesehen" = 17 chars wide

English "FAQ" = 3 chars wide Portuguese "Perguntas freqüentes" = 20 characters wide

It isn't uncommon for english words to expand 200-300% when translated to other languages.

I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels

> I'd love to see a german, italian, or portuguese version of netscape to see how they fit those labels

https://aware7.de/wp-content/uploads/Netscape_4.png

Doesn't look like a showstopper, at least for the specific toolbar icons that Netscape had.

"Verwandte Objek" seems cut off, it should be "Objekte" but other than that it aligns pretty well.

Ps my German is basic so perhaps I'm wrong

nice find! There are a few English bits on there: guide, stop, shop. Wonder why

"Guide" and "stop" are not only English words, but present in lots of European languages. "Shop" is a common loanword from English in lots of these European languages.

I imagine that abbreviations are common in these languages?

It really depends on the phrase. FAQ was just used as an extreme example.

The French made up a translation to fit the acronym.

FAQ = “Foire aux questions”, where “foire” is the French word for a fair, a place where you go to see many things (in this case, questions).

I think when I was in 4th grade, using Netscape, I spoke english but didn't know what FAQ meant. I think I probably searched it on Altavista.