Planet Mozilla L10N

November 22, 2009 12:43 AM

From the hard work by Mozilla’s Metrics team comes localizer metric reports that will show growth and usage data for each of our Firefox locales.  The l10n-drivers team has been asking in meetings if we could show the impact that our volunteers are having with reports like the one sampled below.  If you click the following link you will download a sample report.

Initially, I sketched out what I thought would be valuable information for the report, ran it by the l10n-drivers, and sent it to the metrics team to start implementation.  In my opinion, an effective report provides both download and active daily user information to our localizers about their locales AND the geos in which their locales are being used.  Let’s review the contents for those who might need a guide.  Feel free to reference the attached screen shots as you read.

Locale-specific information

We are presenting both the download and active daily user (ADU) information (usages statistics and pie charts) for versions of Firefox.  ADUs are based on the blocklist pings we track.  (More on blocklist can be found at Mogamic’s post.)

Geographic-specific information

Each report will show both the download and blocklist for the top five locales inside a country where the localizer’s translated Firefox is most prominently used.  In many cases, this is easy to map.  Locale code “fr” is probably most prominently used in France.  “de” in Germany.  “es-ES” in Spain.  In some cases, we’ll have to make guesses, like for our Kurdish localizers.   Finally, we will provide a list of the top ten countries (by average blocklist pings) where the localizer’s Firefox is being used.

For the first time, our community of l10n volunteers will have a more comprehensive set of data points to help measure the progress and spread of their work.  By providing both locale and geographic information, these reports illustrate the impact that each localization teams is providing.

Below are two images of a sample two page report.

and

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November 20, 2009 01:47 AM

Last night the Mozilla community released Firefox 3.6 Beta 3, making it available for free download and issuing an update for all Firefox 3.6 beta users. This update contains over 80 fixes from the last Firefox 3.6 beta, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. More than half of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. If your favorite Add-on isn’t yet compatible, you can also download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter – your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

The Mozilla community appreciates your feedback and assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox. Your beta software will update itself periodically, and eventually will be updated to the final release itself.

The Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features for users to evaluate:

• (New in this update) A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• (New in this update) The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• A mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Firefox 3.6 Beta, or visit the beta download page:

• Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 3.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b3.tar.bz2

As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.

November 18, 2009 12:59 PM

We hate crashes. When Firefox crashes, we try to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible, but we’d much rather you not crash in the first place. In Firefox 3.6, we are changing the way that some third party software hooks into Firefox which should eliminate a good chunk of those crashes without sacrificing our extensibility in any way. In the process, we’ll also be giving you greater control over the code that runs in your browser.

Background

Firefox is built around the idea of extensibility – it’s part of our soul. Users can install extensions that modify the way their browser looks, the way it works, or the things it’s capable of doing. Our add-ons community is an amazing part of the Mozilla ecosystem, one we work hard to grow and improve.

In addition to the standard mechanism for extending the browser via add-ons and plugins, though, there has historically been another way to do it. Third-party applications installed on your machine would sometimes try extend Firefox by just adding their own code directly to the “components” directory, where much of Firefox’s own code is stored.

There are no special abilities that come from doing things this way, but there are some significant disadvantages.  For one thing, components installed in this way aren’t user-visible, meaning that users can’t manage them through the add-ons manager, or disable them if they’re encountering difficulties. What’s worse, components dropped blindly into Firefox in this way don’t carry version information with them, which means that when users upgrade Firefox and these components become incompatible, there’s no way to tell Firefox to disable them. This can lead to all kinds of unfortunate behaviour: lost functionality, performance woes, and outright crashing – often immediately on startup.

In Firefox 3.6 (including upcoming beta refreshes), we’re closing this door. Third party applications can still extend Firefox via add-ons and plugins the way they always could, but the components directory will be for Firefox only.

What Does This Mean For Me?

If you’re a Firefox user, this should be 100% positive. You don’t have to change anything, your regular add-ons should continue to work properly – you just might notice fewer crashes or odd bugs. If you do notice that something has stopped working, particularly a third party addition to Firefox, you might want to contact the producer of that addition to ensure they know about the change.

If you’re a Firefox component developer, this shouldn’t be a big change, either. If you’re already packaging your additions as an XPI, installed as an add-on it’s business as usual. If you have been dropping components directly, though, you’ll need to change to an XPI-based approach. Our migration document on the Mozilla Developer Connection outlines the changes you’ll need to make, and should be pretty straightforward. The good news is that once you’ve done this, your add-on will actually be visible to users and will support proper version information so that our shared users are guaranteed a more positive experience.

If you haven’t downloaded the new Firefox beta yet, and want to give it a spin, you can find a copy here.

Johnathan Nightingale
Human Shield

November 16, 2009 10:25 PM

It turns out that the planned power outage has been rescheduled, so the trees will remain open this weekend. Please go about your normal landing-code-on-weekend activities.

November 13, 2009 10:05 PM

The mozilla-1.9.2 and mobile-browser trees will be CLOSED to all checkins from Friday, November 13th at 6pm PST through Saturday, November 14th at approximately 8pm PST. We will use the standard mechanism for closing the tree, and hg should refuse all checkins during that time. This will not affect mozilla-central, comm-central, mozilla-1.9.1 or any of the CVS trees.

This closure is due to repair work being done at the Mozilla Corporation office in Mountain View which will require that the power be turned off for most of Saturday. Since the entire test and build infrastructure for the Maemo platform is currently housed in that facility, on Tuesday at the Development Meeting we decided to take the tree down instead of working without proper Firefox Maemo build and test runs. Our IT and build engineering teams will be working on the weekend to ensure that the tree is re-opened as soon as possible. For those wishing to track progress, there is, of course, a bug.

Questions should go to this thread in mozilla.dev.planning or #planning on irc.mozilla.org.

(note: as always, bustage and security fixes can be pushed using a checkin comment with the magic words, but please make sure you fully understand the consequences of those actions before doing so!)

November 13, 2009 03:49 PM

I’ve just run across an interesting suggestion for translating “Smiley” into English. Screenshot of it would be

whereas the original (triple-licensed) translation suggestion is on l10n.mozilla.org/narro.

Another interesting aspect of crowd sourcing, box-of-chocolates style. You never know what you get.

November 12, 2009 04:45 PM

Last night the Mozilla community published Firefox 3.6 Beta 2, and issued an update for all Firefox 3.6 beta users. This update contains over 190 fixes from the last Firefox 3.6 beta, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. The Mozilla community appreciates your feedback and assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox. Your beta software will update itself periodically, and eventually will be updated to the final release itself.

The Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features for users to evaluate:

• (New in this update) A mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Firefox 3.6 Beta, or visit the beta download page:

• Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 2.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b2.tar.bz2

At this time most Add-ons have not yet been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. If you wish to help test your Add-ons, please also download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter – your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.

November 11, 2009 01:00 PM

Armen just blogged about this, and as it’s constantly mentioned around l10n, I wanted to add a bit more detail to l10n-merge.

l10n-merge is originally an idea by our Japanese localizer dynamis. The current implementation used in the builds is by me, integrated as an option to compare-locales. There are spin-offs of that algorithm in the silme library, too.

l10n-merge attempts to solve one reason for “yellow screens of death”, i.e., XML parsing errors triggered by incomplete localizations. This is really crucial as localizations don’t just pop up by swinging magic wands, they’re incremental work, and a huge chunk of that. So in order to test your work, you need to see the strings you have in, say, Firefox, without having the other 4000 strings done yet. Other l10n-infrastructures handle this by falling back to the original language at runtime (gettext), but doing that at runtime of course has perf impact, and size. l10n-merge does the same thing at compile (repackaging) time.

Design goals for l10n-merge were:

• not mess with any source repositories
• not do any file-io that’s not really needed

Thus, in order to not mess with the source repos, l10n-merge doesn’t modify the sources inline, but creates copies of the files it touches in a separate dir. Commonly, we’re using ‘merged‘ in the build dir. Now, creating a full copy of everything would be tons of file io, so l10n-merge only creates copies for those files which actually need to get entities added to existing localized content. This plays together with code in JarMaker.py which is able to pick up locale chrome content from several source dirs.

A Firefox localization contains some 450 files, and say for the current 9 B1-to-B2 missing strings in two files, it would copy over those two files from l10n, and add the missing entities to the end. Then JarMaker is called with the right options, and for those two files, will pick them up from merged, the rest of the localization is gotten from l10n. For missing files, it actually looks into the en-US sources, too, so we don’t have to do anything for those. To give an example, for chrome/browser/foo in the browser ‘module’, it searches:

1. .../merged/browser/chrome/foo
2. l10n/ab-CD/browser/chrome/foo
3. mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/foo

Now it’s time to list some pitfalls that come with l10n-merge:

• If you’re passing the wrong dir for mergedir, nothing breaks. All build logic breakage would come from missing files, and due to the fallback to en-US, there are no missing files.
• l10n-merge, as compare-locales, doesn’t cover XML parsing errors inside entity values yet. Bug 504339 is filed, there are some tricky questions on reporting, as well as having to write an XML parser from scratch.
• l10n-merge only appends entities, but that’s fine 95% of the time. Only counter-examples are DTDs including other DTDs.
• People using l10n-merge need to manually maintain the merge dir. Pruning it via compare-locales is risky business if you specify the wrong path by accident, so I consider this a feature. But if you’re seeing Spanish in a French build, clobber the mergedir and build again :-)

November 06, 2009 03:02 PM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.5 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from http://firefox.com/.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.5 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.5 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

November 06, 2009 12:02 AM

November 04, 2009 06:47 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 44/2009 (October 26 - November 1, 2009):

• Releases:
  While I sat in a talk at the Cyber Liberties Conference here in Vienna on Tuesday, I performed the final steps for the big 2.0 release - web site updates and sending out the announcements. Downloads picked up fast and we should be around or over 100,000 of those less than a week later (I don't have good numbers due to disabling bouncer logs once again when database loads became high with Firefox 3.5.4 beings released as well).
  I'm reading and reacting to loads of feedback on the newsgroups, most seems good, esp. migrating from 1.x seems to have slightly rough edges though.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  The final 2.0 release sports 19 official languages plus an experimental Turkish version, and other locales have told me they are working on getting ready to join when we'll do a 2.0.1 in December.
  Two small patches could land to get dashboard ready to support both SeaMonkey branches (sea20x and sea21x) in the future.
  I added Simplified Chinese to our all-locales files, to hopefully have them in as one of those, increasing our world coverage a lot (oh, while we're at Asian languages, Japanese is aiming to join as well).
• Various Discussions:
  AMO and German dictionary, comm-central branching, ChatZilla move to hg, modal windows, dormant accounts, FF 3.5 -> 3.6 updates and SeaMonkey 2.x impact, Cyber Liberties Conference and Open Web track/talks, the twisted clearUserPref() story, Thunderbird 3.0 RC freeze, AMO compatibility center, etc.

November 02, 2009 08:27 PM

Je suis passé cette nuit de Jaunty à Karmic sur mon Lenovo Y650, si vous avez ce modèle de portable, vous pouvez y aller, pas de problème

Les choses que j'ai remarquées :

• Je ne note pas de différence de temps de boot contrairement à ce qui était annoncé partout, par contre le boot est un poil plus joli (pas important pour moi, ma machine est soit allumée soit en veille, je l'éteins ou la redémarre assez peu en fait).
• Le passage en veille n'est pas plus rapide mais la sortie si, l'hibernation marche aussi
• Ma machine est nettement plus réactive pour à peu près tout, j'avais souvent des problèmes de processeur qui s'affolait sur tout ce qui touchait aux paquetages par exemple, ce n'est plus du tout le cas.
• Le thème par défaut est beau et pro.
• Le raccourci clavier pour la mise en veille ne marche plus mais le bouton d'allumage de la machine fait la même chose donc c'est pas génant.
• Ubuntu One est une bonne idée, quand ça marche... J'ai dû réussir à synchronise mes fichiers deux fois seulement
• La nouvelle appli Logithèque Ubuntu est beaucoup mieux que l'ancienne appli à mon avis
• Compiz n'a pas l'air d'avoir de bugs, j'ai toujours eu des petits bugs graphiques qui me faisaient finalement le désactiver, là on dirait que je vais finir par le garder.
• La gestion du son est beaucoup mieux, pas mal d'autres détails Gnome sont mieux aussi d'ailleurs

November 01, 2009 03:17 PM

The Mozilla community is proud to release Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 for download. This beta version of the next version of Firefox is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. The Mozilla community appreciates your feedback and assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox. Your beta software will update itself periodically, and eventually will be updated to the final release itself.

This first revision of the Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Firefox 3.6 Beta, or visit the beta download page:

• Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b1.tar.bz2

At this time most Add-ons have not yet been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. If you wish to help test your Add-ons, please also download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter – your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.

October 31, 2009 12:20 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 43/2009 (October 19 - 25, 2009):

• Releases:
  Yeah, I know, the broken record again,but I guarantee you that this was the last week I've been watching over 2.0 and driving it for release.
  We published RC2 on Monday of that week and after a few days, the picture became clearer and clearer that this one would indeed go gold and so I prepared its conversion to the final 2.0 release as well as the updates of the website (including a feature page update and new screenshots) and spent the Sunday evening writing, getting feedback and native language "review" and finally pre-posting the announcement, so that everything would be ready for a Tuesday morning release.
• Build Machines:
  As it became clear that 2.0 wouldn't need another RC to be built, I could risk some temporary brokenness and possibly permanent changes to the build infrastructure and install the Win7 SDK as well as MozillaBuild 1.4 on the Windows build slaves, which in turn made the Windows comm-central-trunk builds go green again. The closed tree and needed clobbers on the machines for comm-1.9.1 branching did help as well and provide the perfect time to do that work.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  RC2 shipped in 19 official languages including US English, plus another one in experimental stage - and that state was transferred to final unchanged. Some more languages are working on getting ready in time for 2.0.1 - if you're a Mozilla localizer and 2.0 isn't available officially in your language yet, we'd welcome your help on getting in ready for 2.0.1!
  I also cared that we can get dashboard ready to support both SeaMonkey branches (sea20x and sea21x) in the future.
• German L10n:
  Michael Opitz did another large help update, which I could land so that we'll have help more up-to-date in an upcoming 2.0.1 update. Thanks, Michael!
• Various Discussions:
  comm-central branching, RC2 feedback, Mac build machines, Microsoft add-ons and blocklist, findbar, modal windows, download progress windows, dormant accounts, FF 3.5 -> 3.6 updates and SeaMonkey 2.x impact, Cyber Liberties Conference and Open Web track/talks, etc.

October 28, 2009 10:19 PM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.4 and Firefox 3.0.15 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.4 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.15 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.4 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.15 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.4 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

October 28, 2009 03:06 AM

October 23, 2009 09:43 PM

When I was at the Mozilla Camp in Chile, I met Julián Ceballos, the team leader from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula who is working on localizing Firefox in Mayan.  Yesterday, he wrote me, saying,

“In Mozcamp i said, mozilla is no helping just to translate firefox to mayan, mozilla is helping to rescue and make strong the mayan language. Well, i’ll send it and we’ll be in contact.” [sic]

Aw, shucks.  That just makes me happy.

Maybe I have delusions of grandeur as I sit here and sip my Kool-Aid, but I think there is something critical to language preservation happening in the Mozilla localization project for cultural anthropologist and linguists to study.  I’ve discussed this topic with other Mozillans who are interested like Tiffney Mortensen, Chofmann, Staś, John Lilly, Søren Skrøder (Mozilla Denmark), and Kadir Topal (Mozilla Germany).  Every time we ship a new version, even for some of the most niche locales, Mozilla helps just a little bit to preserve the culture of language and communication.  Imagine how unique an experience it becomes for a total newcomer to browse the web with an application whose user interface is both translated and customized for local use.  That can be very powerful and is why we want Mozilla locale count to continue to grow.

To see a little more about what our Mayan friends are doing, check out these links:

• Mayan Firefox language pack
• Screen shot of Mayan Firefox
• Mozilla México en Mérida, Yucatán
• Local press

Do you know of a new localization effort?  I will pay chocolate dipped cake donuts for every referral that becomes a localization.  

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October 20, 2009 06:24 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 42/2009 (October 12 - 18, 2009):

• Releases:
  This should hopefully have been the last week of trying to figure out what patches can still go into 2.0 and approving them, I built SeaMonkey 2.0 RC 2 (with a long track of redoing things), getting it ready for making it public yesterday (including a fix for partial updates so they apply correctly on Windows).
  This should be the final release candidate and if things go well in testing this week, it will be converted to a final 2.0 release scheduled for next Tuesday. woo-hoo!
• Smaller Fixes:
  I tested and reviewed a patch from Adrian to make extra-jar.mn work for localizers, esp. our French guys were happy about this, as they have split mail help into smaller chunks for easier L10n.
  A small patch for showing release notes on first run could also land for RC2, including a followup to make it actually work.
  And, trying to keep users' hard disks clean, I checked in a fix to remove a few unused modules on complete updates.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Catalan chatzilla and venkman was added in time for RC2, Georgian and Swedish could be added as official locales, Turkish requested to only be experimental for RC2 and final due to unfinished translations.
  With that, RC2 ships in 19 official languages including US English, plus one in experimental stage!
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, comm-central branching, 1.9.1.4 builds, RC1 feedback, needed build and machine updates for 2.1/m-c trees, testday, Microsoft add-ons and blocklist, etc.

October 20, 2009 04:46 PM

October 16, 2009 06:08 AM

What could be worse than outdated and disorganized documentation for an open source project looking to grow its volunteers and support its contributors?  I’m not sure, but the l10n-drivers had to wake up each day asking ourselves that question about the state of our localization documents.

Something had to change, but to rectify that problem was a daunting task.  Not only were documents outdated or obsolete, but also they were scattered through the Mozilla Wiki (wikimo) and the Mozilla Developer Center (MDC) like wet leaves across a yard, over into flowerbeds and onto the driveway.

Staś (and the l10n team, but primarily Staś) took up the goal of overhauling Mozilla’s l10n documentation.  One result of a lot of work and many meetings was a Delicious page that we created and titled “Mozdocs“.  If you’ve clicked through on that link, you’ll see our attempt to bookmark and tag *every document written* about Mozilla localization.  This became our base for updating all of our documentation.

The Mozdocs Site

Staś determined that the best way to work was to create an inventory of what we had, categorize that, and then begin work.  And so, we began by finding pages in our documentation and adding them to the Mozdocs page.  We then tagged each page we found with something that described it.

Tagging pages became critical in our ability to work on these docs.  Staś created a set of meta tags that tell us some information about the state of the page.  Namely, does it need to be updated, is it obsolete, does it need to be fixed, should it be deleted, and more.  We also have “location” tags that tell us where we found the document (i.e. my blog, Axel’s blog, Mozilla Wiki, etc.).  Lastly, we have general purpose tags that describe the document.

If you’re interested, Mozdocs could be a very helpful page for you to get a sense of what is in the Mozilla L10n inventory of docs.

New documents, New Naming Guidelines

As foreman of the cleanup crew, Staś also determined that we needed to separate our documents properly.  MDC would serve as the place for docs that describe how to develop and localize and can be abstrated from the Mozilla process.  The Mozilla Wiki would serve as the spot for anything specific to the Mozilla Project’s localization process.

Get that?  MDC = how to/abstract from Mozilla; Wikimo = Mozilla process.

As we created and edited documents, we made sure that they were placed on the proper platform.  Furthermore, we started to rename documents using new “Naming Guidelines“.  If you plan to create a new localization document on the Mozilla Wiki or MDC, we are asking that you use the following (Below is one massive hyperlink to the Naming Guidelines from the previous sentence):

1. Always use the L10n: namespace (wikimo only)
   • Bad: Firefox_productization_guidelines
   • Bad: L10n_Firefox_Productization
   • Good: L10n:Firefox/Productization
2. For hierarchies, use /, not :. This will create breadcrumbs automatically.
   • Bad: L10n:Firefox:Productization
   • Good: L10n:Firefox/Productization
3. Prefer hierarchies than longer names if you need to disambiguate.
   • Bad: L10n:Firefox_Productization
   • Good: L10n:Firefox/Productization
4. If not ambiguous, simplify.
   • Bad: L10n:Product/Firefox/Namoroka
   • Good: L10n:Namoroka
   • Good: L10n:Firefox/Productization and L10n:Mobile/Productization are OK, because L10n:Productization is a more general document.
5. Don’t repeat yourself:
   • Bad: L10n:Firefox/Firefox_Productization
   • Good: L10n:Firefox/Productization
6. Add localization-related tags (on MDC) or categories (on wikimo)
   • On wikimo, use [[Category:L10n]] anywhere in the contents of the page.

Our hope is that all new pages that deal with Localization will follow these naming guidelines.

And now, your turn…

As I mentioned, if you’re interested in scanning the inventory of documents, take a look at Mozdocs and the tags we have created.  This could be a very helpful page for you to get a sense of what is in the Mozilla L10n inventory of docs.

Also, if you are finding new documents, can you please tell us and we’ll tag them on the Delicious site?  Staś is the module owner of this site and we are accepting any “patches” to it.  So, if you want to add something, just let us know and we will make the change.

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October 14, 2009 10:39 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 41/2009 (September 28 - October 4, 2009):

• Releases:
  On the risk of sounding like a broken record, once again one of my main work items this week was release driving for 2.0 - the news is that we have released SeaMonkey 2.0 RC 1 on Saturday, I spent a large amount of time building it and later could push it public.
  Follwoing that, I worked on a few followup issues found in build verification and early testing.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  We could add Italian and UK English to the all-locales file for SeaMonkey - it looks like both are not just yet ready to deliver a complete localization for 2.0 final, but we hope they'll make 2.0.1 a number of weeks later.
  On the actual shipping side, RC 1 shipped in 18 languages including US English, which mean we have all locales on board that shipped either of the betas - with more to come in RC2 (which hopefully will be final).
• German L10n:
  I synched up the last changes to about:rights and ChatZilla just in time for the RC 1, German should therefore be complete for the 2.0 series - except for minor bugs, which are usually only reported when it goes to the masses in any case.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, gloda, comm-central branching, 1.9.1.4 builds, RC1 feedback, etc.

October 14, 2009 10:00 PM

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

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October 09, 2009 09:13 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 40/2009 (September 28 - October 4, 2009):

• Releases:
  Another week of intense release driving - we had the string freeze for the whole 2.0 series this week, and the code freeze just after it. Things are looking good for the release, RC1 should come later this or early next week, depending on the speed of the build machines and our QA. We now have 130 fixed-seamonkey2.0 bugs, a lot of work has happened here!
• Default Theme Icons:
  The task icons for the new default theme could land this week.
• Build machines:
  On the weekend, I filed a bug on tinderbox reporting being brokwn which was fixed fast by Mozilla IT - thanks justdave!
  Also, I talked to Seth from the community giving program and he told we they are committed to give us the machines we were promised to get, so the ball in in IT's court now, I'll get into contact with them.
• EU MozCamp Prague:
  I had tons of interesting talk with people from all over the Mozilla community at EU MozCamp 2009 in Prague - from core SeaMonkey contributors via Moco folks and localizers to Thunderbird, Lightning and KompoZer people - and writing down everything here would be too much. Though it's clear that even I love this community!
  One topic is something i should probably highlight somewhat: The KompoZer folks and us from SeaMonkey agreed to cooperate much more in the future, we talked about how to work together to improve both SeaMonkey 2.1 and KompoZer 0.9 by sharing code and making KompoZer join comm-central for those Mozilla-1.9.3-based release and beyond.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I fixed a small typo in an en-US file so that it doesn't creep into locales as well.
  Also, after the string freeze, I started the opt-in thread for 2.0 RC1 and final.
• German L10n:
  I synched up de SeaMonkey with the current trunk on the day before string freeze, so that only one change was left for opting in for RC1 later on.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, gloda, comm-central branching, 1.9.1.4 changes, www.mozilla.org planning, etc.

October 07, 2009 11:57 PM

October 03, 2009 11:31 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 39/2009 (September 21 - 27, 2009):

• Releases:
  Once again, I spent a lot of time release driving work for 2.0, blockers are down to 5 and one request now. We are up to 113 fixed-seamonkey2.0 bugs now, quite a large number of small fixes landing to finish up this release.
• Default Theme Icons:
  I uploaded a new patch for the task icon part of the new icon set for the default theme that week, meanwhile this has already landed.
• Support Mails:
  I went through the accumulating support mails in my inbox subfolder once again (I only do that every few months) and replied to every mail there that hadn't got a reply from someone else. This always takes some time, but I don't want to leave such mails without any reply, even if it takes a long time to come and even if me or council are the wrong people to contact for support.
• ISPDB:
  I filed a few bugs on ISPDB, the database Mozilla Messaging is building for the "autoconfig" feature of Thunderbird 3, which we probably want to use for SeaMonkey as well in the future. It enables users to just enter their email address and have most account settings configured automatically by pulling the relevant info from the server.
• Statistics:
  I mailed Daniel from the Mozilla Metrics team if I could get a few numbers of how SeaMonkey 2 is doing, and he sent me some good data culminating in my recent blog post on SeaMonkey statistics. Interesting material, thanks, Daniel!
  I also received some interesting statistics on the spread of fixed bugs in the 2.0 cycle across people and components, I'll post about that when we get it updated after the code freeze.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, 1.1.18, gloda, comm-central branching, Thunderbird UI changes, Mozilla Camp Europe, talk about Mozilla at a FOSS event in Vienna, etc.

October 01, 2009 01:03 AM

Ever wonder what it takes to make a website localizable?

Last quarter, the l10n-drivers set out to document the steps necessary to make a web site or web application localizable (i.e. designing a project so it can be translated and localized).  All too often, we found ourselves providing feedback on projects that had begun with the intention to reach a global audience, but had not been designed to scale at the intended level.

To illustrate our point, we decided to choose a real life example that we could go through with a team of project managers to document the steps necessary to make a project localizable.  What we needed was a pilot project that had launched quickly to test a concept and see if the idea had enough global appeal that it would require localization.  We chose Get Personas as the test case because it fit our criteria perfectly.  With this project, Mozilla Labs had a site that had launched to prove its concept.  Mozilla Labs often moves quickly and may not have the time or resources to map out just what of its many projects might take off since some of them may not.  In this case, Personas quickly appeared to have global appeal and a need for l10n, but it contained project design flaws that did not have localization in mind from the beginning.

After working for the entire quarter with Mozilla’s Ryan Doherty, who was charged with making the site localizable, Staś Małolepszy, with Pascal Chevrel’s guidance and some from me, compiled all that we learned into several documents now hosted on the Mozilla wiki and on the Mozilla Development Center.  Our intended audience for these documents is marketing and web dev folks.

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to make a website localizable so it can scale to a global audience, please take a look at this wiki page and its links to other important documentation.

We’ll walk through the piece of this wiki page in more detail in a few forthcoming posts.

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September 30, 2009 04:58 PM

For those of you who will be joining me at the MozEUCamp in Prague next weekend, I’ve updated the l10n track on the schedule and written longer descriptions of the presentations that will be given by the l10n-drivers and some critical volunteers (jhiatt and adriank).

Got a presentation or topic you want to discuss?  Email me or comment or this blog and we’ll see how to get it in a slot.  I intentionally left some open blocks so localizers can attend other non-l10n talks of interest.   See you in Prague next week.

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September 25, 2009 07:54 AM

Tomer, from the Hebrew localization team, highlighted an interesting problem the other day when he emailed the l10n-drivers to point out an issue that has been bothering him and many other localizers.  Sometimes, developers will change entities in our locales/en-US directory, but forget to change the localization note above it to reflect the new entity.  As Tomer explains,

“This causes the comment to become irrelevant to the text it references.  Additionally, if someone then fixes the localization note, localizers won’t be notified on this change, and the comment does not get changed in our translations…As some of us are actually reading such comments before translating, it is important to get it 100% accurate.”

Here is an example that Tomer provides.

<!– LOCALIZATION NOTE (bookmarksSidebarGtkCmd.commandkey): This command
-  key should not contain the letters A-F, since these are reserved
-  shortcut keys on Linux. –>
<!ENTITY bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey “o”>

You can see that example in our code on MXR here:  http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.9.2/source/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/browser.dtd#110

For those readers who may not be seeing what is happening here, notice that the <!– LOCALIZATION NOTE –> is referencing “bookmarksSidebarGtkCmd.commandkey“, but the !ENTITY variable name is actually “bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey“.

That mismatch in the entity names has made that localization note untrackable by any locaization tools.  Unfortunately, localization tools will not understand which comment belongs to bookmarksGtkCmd.commandkey.  Furthermore, localizers who use these notes for translations will have to make the educated guess where the comment is pointing.  If the note gets updated in the future, it’s likely that localizers will miss it.

Tomer suggested writing a script to look for these mismatches.  In the very least, I am hoping this post will spread the awareness to developers to remember to do this.  A quick request from l10n community: please maintain localization notes if entities get changed.

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September 22, 2009 08:36 PM

While we were in the Philippines, Gen and I learned quite a bit about the local Internet landscape there.  I thought I would share some more information that I picked up from the trip.

• Population is 92 million, online population is between 20-24 million
• English is one of the official languages of the Philippines.  Tagalog is spoken by roughly 22 million people in and around Manila.  Cebuano is another language spoken by nearly 20 million Filipinos south of the Luzon region (where Manila is located).
• Depending on what factor we use as a multiplier for our blocklist/AUS ping data, we can estimate that between 3 and 6 million Filipinos are using Firefox.  That is a rough guess, but it places Firefox market share at a low-end of 12.5% and a high-end of 30%
• Most people we spoke to browse the Web in English (Firefox US version), but some did suggest that a local version would have appeal.
• Even further debate arose on whether a Tagalog version would have traction, with an audience of bloggers at Wordcamp responding collectively that it might not.

That latter point does not rule out Mozilla shipping a local version of Firefox.  But, like every other localization, if we were to ship something localized to the Philippines, it will be because a local community member(s) responds to my call to action and decides to help us complete the body of work.

Obviously, Mozilla Firefox is taking off in the the Philippines, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see if the nascent community stepped forward with an offer to localize Firefox.

Finally, take a look at some stats about Firefox in the Philippines.  (All numbers are based on our blocklist data.)

Growth of blocklist pings over one year

The Philippines is #4 on the list

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September 22, 2009 08:41 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 38/2009 (September 14 - 20, 2009):

• Releases:
  Good parts of my time this week were spent in release driving work - triaging the rest of the blocking and wanted flag requests (mostly ones where Ian and/or me were unsure what to do in the past), approving fixes we can still take for 2.0, and trying to poke people to get the remaining blockers fixed and the wanted bugs resolved where possible.
  We're down to 7 blockers and two requests made by me now, one of which probably has been rendered bogus as it now has an approved fix. Open wanted bugs are at 27 now, but a number of them don't need to be fixed, even though they would be nice to have. At the same time, fixed bugs since 2.0b2 are up at 76, which is quite a lot for two weeks in the SeaMonkey world and really nice to see!
• Build Machines:
  I did shut down buildbot on our Tiger test box as it has started to become somewhat unreliable recently and we have Leopard coverage in any case.
• Lightning Support:
  As we have tabmail in 2.0b2, we could support Lightning in principle with that milestone, but found out that Lightning nightlies won't claim they are compatible with it. So I filed a patch to make the minimum SeaMonkey version accepted by Lightning 1.0pre always to be 2.0b2 for now.
  A blog post on this seened useful, as people started commenting about 2.0b2 and Lightning in my older entry on the general matter.
  I also filed bugs on the two major issues we've been still seeing there, missing pref UI and an error with the invitation UI - both of which have been fixed within this week, either on SeaMonkey or on Lightning, so nightlies on both should work pretty well together now.
• Small Fixes:
  I fixed AMO URLs that had broken certificates - this unfortunately has an impact on all localizations without being able to change a string ID, so I posted on the L10n list/group about it.
  A small NSS packaging fix also keeps us working with the NSS update that has happened on the platform.
• Default Theme Icons:
  The bug about a new icon set for the default theme has stalled for a long time after the main toolbars of all applications as well as the smaller MailNews icons had been done. To get things moving again, I posted a list of icons that are still unchanged from the old set in the bug and I did a patch for the task icons that appear in the component bar at the left bottom of the windows and in the Window menu.
  More help on the rest of the missing buttons is badly wanted, this is work that only needs design knowledge, not code knowledge!
• Website Work:
  An update to our documentation on location-aware browsing (geolocation) has long been overdue, and I was reminded of this on IRC, I went and did that work now, making our info page fit with its Firefox equivalent. As that page links a SeaMonkey privacy policy, which we didn't have so far, I also created that, seeding it with Firefox's policy and fitting it to our needs. It sounded logical to put this into a new legal resources section on our website.
• German L10n:
  I added another round of fixes for the latest SeaMonkey code changes.
• Various Discussions:
  2.0b2 feedback, EnigMail support, NSS initialization on 1.1.18, gloda test failures, comm-central permissions, comm-central branching, SeaMonkey testday, Thunderbird UI changes, AMO process and reviews, Mozilla Camp Europe, OpenWebCamp Vienna, talk about Mozilla at a FOSS event in Vienna, etc.

September 21, 2009 08:09 PM

Gen and I attended WordCamp Philippines and I presented today to the audience of about 100-150 people. The purpose of our visit and participation was straightforward:

1. To gain further insight into the landscapeof the Web and Internet in the Philippines;
2. To assess whether or not a localized version is something our community here mightpursue;
3. To meet our community of campus reps and others.

It’s been a steamy (as in the humidity), but amazingly kind reception here and we booked our schedules full with meetings and events. That’s all Gen’s amazing work.

As for my WordCamp chat, here is my presentation. I started by taking the audience through our open web demos (video, canvas, svg, css, js etc. thank you Paul Rouget…), and then honed in on describing our Mozilla community, using localization as an example of how we are a global community of passionate contributors working to promote Mozilla’s mission.

My call to action was two-fold: the blogging community can help promote the Open Web through their blogs, AND, if people feel empowered to do so, let’s start a localization for Filipino users.

Feedback from these local bloggers was energetic, questions were poignant, and the message was embraced. My prediction, a Mozilla community here is going to take off if we continue to nurture, empower, and participate.

I am trying to embed the presentation here, based on some code that Gen shared with me, but it looks like it is not working.

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September 19, 2009 12:20 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 37/2009 (September 7 - 13, 2009):

• Releases:
  Continued uploading contributed 1.1.18 builds.
  The big work item for this week was SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 though. As I need to play release driver, build engineer, marketing guy and some part of the QA lead, it took some time to get everything finished off, but I could push the beta public on Saturday. So far, everything looks fine and feedback from that release is already leading to patches being landed for 2.0 final.
• Build Machines:
  I had more discussions with Mozilla IT on how to solve the unsatisfactory situation we are in due to Parallels not delivering the stable virtualization of Mac machines we'd need, and they might get us a few minis set up. Going virtual would have been nice but unfortunately there is no good solution for this yet apparently.
  I also fought an instability of tests on Tiger, I guess it's time to make our testing on Mqac Leopard-only.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Beta 2 could go public with 17 official languages (including US English). I hope this number will even rise with RCs and final.
• German L10n:
  Unfortunately, there's a nasty typo in German SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 that breaks sending email to SMTP servers that need authentication. People only found that when testing the beta itself, but I found the cause and current nightlies as well as RCs next month are fixed, the German newsgroup has a fix circulating for those who dare to edit files inside a zipped de.jar file of their installation.
  I also updated the localization for a few changes made since we re-opened the tree for post-beta fixes.
• Various Discussions:
  Lightning support, EnigMail support, 2.0 approvals, quit dialogs, intermittent 1.1.18 NSS problems on Linux, QA community, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Weekly Project Meetings, etc.

September 17, 2009 12:11 AM

We wrote last week about a new project we’ve started, informing our users when they’re running out of date versions of popular plugins. We focused our initial efforts on the Adobe Flash Player and now, a week after launch, Mozilla’s Numerator, Ken Kovash, has a blog post up looking at the results.

Those results have been nothing short of awesome. In the first week that the project has been live, we’ve seen 10 million people click through from our page to Adobe’s update site. As Ken points out, this is not just a huge number, it’s also about 5x higher click through than that page typically sees.

We’re continuing to look for ways to help our users stay safe and up to date. We’re working to roll other plugins into our web-based checking, and the Firefox team is also building an integrated check that will let you know whenever a site you visit is trying to use an outdated plugin (more on that soon). This is just the beginning.

September 16, 2009 09:49 PM

Over the past couple Firefox releases, the Mozilla community has proudly shipped a Mongolian localization of Firefox.  And, based on the blocklist pings that Firefox makes everyday, we can estimtate that we have between 10,000 and 20,000 active daily users in that locale.  That’s a nice accomplishment by the Mongolian community!

However, as we ramp up our efforts to localize Firefox 3.6, and a mobile Firefox, we have been reaching out to our “mn” community leader, Natsagdorj (Nagi) Shagdar, but have had no response to the emails we have sent.  I guess it’s an inevitability to have some turnover when a 100% volunteer community rallies together to ship Firefox in over 70 languages.  Building sustainable communities is critical to our ongoing success and something we take very seriously.

Therefore, this is an open blog post to reconnect with our Mongolian team in order to make sure everything is OK and receive a status update on the work/team going forward.  It would be terrific to receive an email from Nagi or others to let me know how to proceed with work on the mn locale.

This post serves a secondary purpose because we also would like to invite any others interested in joining the Mozilla Mongolian community to contact us.  We are looking for community members to help take up some of the localization effort so we don’t lose all that we have accomplished with the mn version.  Plus, we don’t want to let down thousands of our Mongolian users who will be looking for the latest and greatest when Firefox 3.6 comes out.

If you have interest in joining the community or know of anyone who might help in some capacity (even with simple referrals), then contact me through the comment section of this blog.  We have a robust set of community members and tools that makes localization easy and fun.

As a matter of fact, we are welcoming all newcomers, so just ping me.  Thanks, everyone!

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September 16, 2009 06:46 PM

September 11, 2009 05:54 AM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.3 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.14 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.3 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.14 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.3 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

September 09, 2009 11:11 PM

As we’re struggling with our string freezes for 1.9.2, I figured I’d put something up on planet for everyone to notice:

• String freezes are one only, and done with. No “I’ll get that in the next milestone”. First string freeze is the last.
• String freeze for mobile-browser and toolkit was last Friday. For mobile-browser seriously this Friday, Sept 11th. (*).
• String freeze for Firefox 3.6 is Sept 14th.

September 09, 2009 09:59 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 36/2009 (August 31 - September 6, 2009):

• Releases:
  Released 1.1.18, including putting relnotes and announcements online and uploading contributed builds.
  Also, SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 went into a freeze, I did start the release process, including tagging and creating builds and updates for all 17 languages including US English. The process went smoother than for 2.0b1 but still had a few hiccups, both due to my faults and the build machines not being as stable and speedy as we could hope.
• Build System:
  Created and landed a patch to ship an add-on blocklist in our builds, and as AMO people also updated the list there and I used that, we are now saving our users from crashes etc. from bad plugins right from the start.
• Identity/EV UI:
  My patch for an identity icon in the Page Info "Security" tab could land this week right before 2.0b2 was frozen up, so people get a better visual clue on the security of the viewed page.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  We had 16 locales opting in with valid changesets, unfortunately cs didn't make it this time, but nl joined and the ones that were unofficial for Beta 1 are also official in Beta 2 so we are up 2 languages for 17 official languages supported including US English in Beta 2. I hope the numbers will rise even more for the RC(s) and final.
• Various Discussions:
  Mac build boxes, tree rules towards 2.0, Lightning support, quit dialogs, 1.1.18 NSS problems on ancient Windows and intermittently on Linux, SeaMonkey and Snow Leopard, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Weekly Project Meetings, etc.

September 08, 2009 06:29 PM

Starting with the upcoming releases of Firefox 3.5.3 and Firefox 3.0.14, Mozilla will warn users if their version of the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin is out of date. Old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a significant security risk. For now our focus is on the Adobe Flash Player both because of its popularity and because some studies have shown that as many as 80% of users currently have an out of date version.

After installing the Firefox security update, users with an out of date version of the Adobe Flash Player will see this message:

Our intent is to get the user’s attention, and direct them to the Adobe web site where they can download the most up to date version.

For users who are already running the latest version, or who don’t have the Adobe Flash Player installed, the page will look very much like what they would normally see after a Firefox security update:

Mozilla will work with other plugin vendors to provide similar checks for their products in the future. Keeping your software up to date remains one of the best things you can do to keep yourself safe online, and Mozilla will continue to look for ways to make that process as easy as possible for its users.

September 04, 2009 08:24 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 35/2009 (August 24 - 30, 2009):

• Releases:
  I've spun a second round of Windows candidates for 1.1.18, things look good now for releasing this version very soon.
  In Parallel, we've frozen strings for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and are taking L10n opt-in from localizers as we speak, freezing the code as well this night and hoping to kick off build very soon.
• Build System:
  I closed up filtering out the entries I had so far in my new buildsystem porting tool, and wrote up a blog entry about it.
• Identity/EV UI:
  Sitting in the train and looking for something to do, I took an hour (or possibly less) to write up a patch for an identity icon in the Page Info "Security" tab, which is where you get to when clicking on any of the security indicators in the status or url bar of the browser. With that icon, users can get an impression of the security level of a site without reading all the info on the tab in detail: green icon is an EV (extended verification) level that verifies the identity of the other side, blue icon is a normal secure level that verifies the domain of the other side, gray icon is no security.
  The patch landed after the week I'm reporting on but in time for 2.0b2.
• Automated tests:
  I filed and tried to help fix mochitest timeouts on the SeaMonkey2.0 tree, but it looks like the patch Honza Bambas came up with breaks Firefox3.5 tests, while it interestingly work well for Firefox trunk. We need to further investigate this.
• Session Store:
  I landed patches for Undo close window, another feature that came just in time before the feature freeze for the SeaMonkey 2.0 series. Thanks to Misak Khachatryan for doing the work and porting that functionality to SeaMonkey!
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I started the opt-in thread for SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 2 and hope many localizations will join the train this time!
• German L10n:
  I landed two patches with help updates, thanks to Michael Opitz for doing this work. Also, I integrated more work for fixing spelling mistakes in ChatZilla, here the thanks go to Hagen Halbach for finding them and offering a patch.
  Next to that, I updated the localization for a number of SeaMonkey changes coming in before the string freeze for the upcoming second beta.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, Mac build boxes, QA team, www.mozilla.org new design going live, Mozilla Camp Europe, etc.

September 01, 2009 07:50 PM

<appName: "Jägermeister"
 gender: "male">

appName = "Jägermeister" {
    gender: "male" }

<complex[appName.gender]: {
	male: "Ein hübscher ${appName}s.",
	female: "Ein hübsches ${appName}s."}>

complex = [appName.gender] {
        male: "Ein hübscher ${appName}s.",
	female: "Ein hübsches ${appName}s."}

<button: {value: "Push me", accesskey: "p"}>

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August 28, 2009 09:25 PM

August 28, 2009 06:55 AM

Asa passed me this Read Write Web article about the Worldwide Lexicon’s project, Firefox Universal Translator, which helps translate web pages automatically within the browsing experience. The tool enables project members to create, curate, and share translations.  Have you seen it and what do you think?  I’m curious to hear.

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August 26, 2009 08:44 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 34/2009 (August 17 - 23, 2009):

• Releases:
  After I could fix at least one major problem on the Linux 1.1.x build box (something is still strange with nightlies), I started the release process for SeaMonkey 1.1.18, which has a major upgrade of NSS (and NSPR) as the only major change, which fixes a few SSL issues, including possible MITM of SSL connections. We found a regression on Windows, failing to package some new files coming up with that upgrade and rendering NSS unusable, we're fixing this right now and doing a second round of candidates with it.
  A 1.1.19 in a few weeks will then catch up with other fixes ported from Firefox 3.0.13 and 3.0.14 (the NSS we ship now is exactly the same as in those versions).
  I also filed a bug on 2.1a1 as well as 1.1.19 flags on Bugzilla, we now can mark things we'd like to see fixed in those future milestones.
• Build System:
  Even more review for Serge's patches for porting build system changes to comm-central and and some, but not much progress in filtering out the to-be-ported changes in my new tool.
• Various Discussions:
  Tabmail, Mac build boxes, AMO and SeaMonkey, QA team, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, Mozilla Creative Collective, SUMO browser sniffing, doorhanger notification plans, Thunderbird schedules, etc.

August 25, 2009 07:55 PM

As promised, here is the second post from Jeremy Hiatt’s work on our l20n project.  This is a word-for-word reposting of his essay about compiling localizable objects in native JS.

====================================

One of the goals for my summer internship is to improve performance of l20n. The initial implementation was a parser written entirely in JavaScript that operated on .lol files. For more details about our choices for file formats, see my previous post. After some failed attempts to rework the parser’s use of regular expressions that regressed performance, I experimented with JSON as an alternative file format. The hope was that we could leverage the performance of Gecko’s built-in JSON parser to speed up l20n. We did see some tremendous improvements: on a large testcase constructed from browser.dtd, JSON cut our parsing time from ~140 milliseconds down to just a few ms. Unfortunately, we were still slow when it came to evaluating and displaying all those entities. We still had a big chunk of parsing left that we couldn’t outsource to JSON. Each string value in l20n may contain variable placeholders. Here’s an example (in JSON):

"droponbookmarksbutton" : {
    "value" : "Drop a link to bookmark it"},

"popupWarning" : {
    "value" : "${brandShortName}s prevented this site
              from opening a pop-up window."}

(Line breaks inserted for clarity.) The first string doesn’t use any variables, but the second does. In order to catch all these placeholders, we scanned each string with a regular expression to match the ${…}s syntax, even though many strings don’t use any variables. That translated to a linear traversal of every single string before it could be returned, costing us a lot of time. In tests conducted in the xpcshell, rendering all the elements from browser.properties took roughly 40ms. In comparison, the current framework for properties files can parse and display all the elements in under 20ms. Since we can’t afford to regress overall performance, that meant we still had work to do to get faster.

One way to eliminate checking every single string is to add extra information to the encoding for strings. Many languages define different behavior for single- vs. double-quoted strings, performing replacements in one but not the other. We could also have added a special flag to indicate simple (no replacements) vs. complex strings. Either of these approaches would have added further complexity to the localization process, so we did not seriously consider this approach.

Instead, on the advice of the brilliant Staś Małolepszy, we embarked on an experiment to compile our l20n objects into native JavaScript. As a result, we saw another impressive performance jump. In an xpcshell test, we can load and display all of browser.properties in roughly 4ms (an order of magnitude improvement!). Here’s what our previous example looks like as compiled JavaScript:

this.droponbookmarksbutton="Drop a link to bookmark it";
this.__defineGetter__("popupWarning",
  function() { return "" + (brandShortName) +
    " prevented this site from opening a pop-up window.";});

Another great thing about compilation is that our runtime performance doesn’t depend on our choice of source file format. Here’s a diagram showing the different ways an l20n file can get inflated into a localization context:

Inflating l20n source into a context

The performance numbers were collected using nsITimelineService in the xpcshell. The l20n runtime infrastructure can inflate a source file directly into a context, or it can load compiled JavaScript definitions for a significant performance boost. For comparison, here’s a diagram of Mozilla’s current l10n scheme:

Current l10n scheme

Again, this time was measured in the xpcshell when loading the browser.properties string bundle. It’s not necessarily representative of performance for DTD files as well. As we can see, compilation now guarantees at least comparable performance to the current approach, no matter what file format we end up using. If you’d like to weigh in on that debate, please leave a comment on my previous post! And finally, we are also working on l20n support in Silme so that it will be easy to migrate existing DTD/.properties files to our new l20n format.

Intercompatibility with Silme

Silme will serve as a critical compatibility layer to ensure a smooth transition to our new l10n framework. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments!

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August 25, 2009 03:59 PM

<brandShortName: "Minefield">
<brandFullName: "Minefield">
<vendorShortName: "Mozilla">
<logoCopyright: " ">

<!ENTITY  brandShortName        "Minefield">
<!ENTITY  brandFullName         "Minefield">
<!ENTITY  vendorShortName       "Mozilla">
<!ENTITY  logoCopyright         " ">

/* This entity references a gendered noun */
<complex[appName.gender]: {
    male: "Ein hübscher ${appName}s.",
    female: "Ein hübsches ${appName}s."}>

/* This is a gendered noun */
<appName: "Jägermeister"
 gender: "male">

{"brandShortName" : {"value" : "Minefield"},
 "brandFullName" : {"value" : "Minefield"},
 "vendorShortName" : {"value" : "Mozilla"},
 "logoCopyright" : {"value" : " "}}

{ "complex" :
    {"indices" : ["appName.gender"],
     "value" : { "male" : "Ein hübscher ${appName}s.",
                 "female" : "Ein hübsches ${appName}s."}},

  "appName" : {"value" : "Jägermeister",
                  "gender" : "male"}}

brandShortName: Minefield
brandFullName: Minefield
vendorShortName: Mozilla
logoCopyright:

complex:
    indices: appName.gender
    value:
        male: Ein hübscher ${appName}s.
        female: Ein hübsches ${appName}s.

appName: {value: Jägermeister, gender: male}

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August 25, 2009 12:49 AM

August 17, 2009 11:01 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 33/2009 (August 10 - 16, 2009):

• Build and Release Machinery:
  The last step for release automation is done - after the move of CC* release factories to buildbotcustom, we have all the tooling for comm-central-based releases in shared code. We share those classes completely betwen SeaMonkey and Thunderbird release automation in the future, and also share as much as possible with the Firefox process. Because of that, any fixes in the process benefit all of us at once, and we all have the same tools for verification of updates, etc. There should be quite some mutual benefit in this.
• Build System:
  I reviewed more patches from Serge for porting build system changes to comm-central and next to this worked with my new tool described here last week to filter out those changes that still need porting. From about 350 changes last week I could filter the list down to about 230 right now, and that list still needs a bit more work to eliminate changes that we actually don't need to port after all. When I get to finish that filtering, I'll post a link publicly, until then, links are available on personal request.
• Download Manager:
  I did another pass on the "Properties" view patch and now included a test that actually calls it, checks that indeed a progress window comes up and that it correctly gets the end time for finished downloads. The patch got review and could land on Sunday. This patch also fixed the wrong icon on the download manager window, it displays its own icon again now.
• German L10n:
  As reported in a bug, German SeaMonkey 2.x builds had strings overflowing multiple panels in the account manager. I fixed that by both increasing the account manager width and shortening a number of strings. While I was at it, I took care that preference panels fit as well.
• Various Discussions:
  2.0b2 and 2.0 final scheduling, 1.8.1.23 security release, tabmail, new Mac theme, SMILE, QA team rebuilding possibilities, AMO and SeaMonkey, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, Community Store contacts, etc.

August 17, 2009 07:33 PM

Starting a little later tonight, users with the latest version of Firefox 3 will be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3.5. If you’re running Firefox 3.0.13 you will see the offer in the next couple of days, though if you’re eager you can always “Check for Updates” in the “Help” menu. This is what the offer will look like:

Clicking the “Upgrade to Firefox 3.5″ link will open a new tab with more information about Firefox 3.5 to help you make your decision about upgrading. From there, you have a choice:

• select Later if you don’t want to decide now; Firefox will ask again in 24 hours
• select Never if you don’t want to accept this upgrade offer; we might send you another offer again in the future, but it won’t be for several weeks or months
• select Get the new version to continue on with the upgrade process!

Once you’ve accepted that, Firefox will download and install the update, then offer to restart the browser. When you restart, you’ll be rolling with Firefox 3.5!

Now, although over 90% of Firefox add-ons have been updated to be compatible with Firefox 3.5, in some cases the authors have created entirely new versions. If that happens with your favorite add-on, you might see the following screen:

You can see exactly which add-ons are being flagged as potentially incompatible by clicking on Show List. As mentioned above, for most popular add-ons, there probably is an update available, but you’ll need to install Firefox 3.5 first in order to check. If you continue with the update process, when Firefox 3.5 starts up for the first time you’ll see the following screen:

By all means, Check Now to see if there’s a version of that add-on which works with Firefox 3.5. If there is, you’ll see the following:

You’ll want to Install Now which will fetch the update and then continue loading Firefox 3.5.

If an update isn’t available, Firefox will check every day and let you know once the add-on author has created one. If you’ve come this far and decide that you can’t live without your favorite add-on, you can always go to www.firefox.com and click on “Other Languages and Systems”, and click on the link to download an older version of Firefox.

August 14, 2009 12:18 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 32/2009 (August 3 - 9, 2009):

• Build and Release Machinery:
  When I got alerted to the link to the source tarball for 2.0b1 being wrong, I tracked the issue down to a wrong filename caused by a variable in the build harness, which I could then fix easily for all our future releases.
  While I was there, I decided to finally go the last step for release automation and file a patch for moving the CC* releases factories to buildbotcustom. When testing this patch with current buildbotcustom, I saw some redness caused by an earlier patch and fixed it by using correct references to the mozilla directories.
  I also helped Thunderbird folks to fix some bustage of their L10n builds when they switched to the same repack classes we are using (and which share code with Firefox et al).
  The compile failures of comm-central-trunk builds on two Linux VMs were solved by increasing their RAM, at the same time the disk size of one of them was increased to match our other boxes. Thanks to Mozilla IT for those upgrades.
  The bad news from IT come mainly in the form that we don't think that the network issues with Parallels will be fixed, so we need to find other solutions to get the two VMs we are still missing. All in all, the Parallels experiment ended up as quite a disappointment. Even if it sounded good to have virtualized Macs, there seems not to be a mature solution to do that in a server-style environment yet.
  Continued investigating the issue with the "hoshi" box that does SeaMonkey 1.1. Linux builds, might all come down a filesystem problem I can't solve remotely.
• Build System:
  Porting changes from the Mozilla build system to the comm-central release system is an ongoing and probably never-ending task. While Serge has gone for porting a number of patches in that area, my watching of the change feeds of the relevant files ended up badly as I couldn't find the time to flag new changes as needed or unneeded and much less do the actual porting.
  For some time, I had the thought in my head to do a webtool that would poll those feeds and enable marking of changes we don't need to port or are ported, as well as bugs filed on porting, etc.
  I finally got around to working on that tool this week, and while it's mostly working, I'm a bit reluctant to link it publicly, as the main page still lists almost 350 changes to be looked at right now, and a good number of that still need to be set to being ignored (i.e. not needed porting) or being already ported. Also, right now only I can edit anything in the tool, but better permission management can be added easily, it just wasn't a priority.
  If you are interested in that tool, pass me a note, I can give you a link - it's publicly accessible, just not openly linked for now.
• Download Manager:
  Once again, I came back to download manager work this week. Linking progress windows from download manager as a "Properties" view was something I left out in the original patches so development of the two parts could progress individually. Now that both exist, we can easily link them. I have a patch up that would have review, but I need to look into one nit/improvement before actually landing it.
  And while I was at it, I went through all open bugs in the "Download & File Handling" component of SeaMonkey and triaged them - some were moved on the respective backends in toolkit or core, the majority could be duped or otherwise closed based on the rewrite and the testing I did on all that rewritten UI. In the end, slightly over 30 open bugs were left in the component out of 120 or so before my triage. It's nice to be able to find the really relevant ones easily now.
• German L10n:
  Once again mainly mailnews updates to keep SeaMonkey L10n up to date.
• Various Discussions:
  1.8.1.23 security release - build and planning issues, tabmail, new Mac theme, code style discussion, www.mozilla.org planning, Mozilla Camp Europe, etc.

August 10, 2009 03:10 PM

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

This Alpha of Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Compositor (Phase 1), which moves Gecko to using one native widget per top-level content document. See this blog post or bug 374980 for more details.
• A new focus model, described here and tracked in bug 178324
• The chromedir attribute has been replaced with a pseudoclass
• Several new CSS3 properties including background size and gradients for background images
• Speed improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Startup and responsiveness improvements throughout the application

Anyone interested in Namoroka should read the article about Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For a full list of changes, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Namoroka:

• Windows: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: namoroka-3.6a1.tar.bz2

We would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have, or any bugs you may find.

August 08, 2009 12:03 AM

August 07, 2009 10:58 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 31/2009 (July 27 - August 2, 2009):

• Build System and Release Harness:
  Continued investigating the issue with the "hoshi" box that does SeaMonkey 1.1. Linux builds.
• Planning and Feedback:
  I spent a good amount of time with both looking at feedback for 2.0 Beta 1, which look quite positive in principle, but includes a few reports of regressions and bugs that need attention, as well as planning for the second beta and even final. We discussed the latter at the SeaMonkey Status Meeting and decied to decouple the schedule from Thunderbird so that we're able to get the new generation out and can set a stamp on retiring the old one, which is really overdue.
  I also closely followed the planning for an upcoming security update for 1.8-based releases, which will include a SeaMonkey 1.1.18.
• German L10n:
  Some mailnews updates for keeping de sea20x green.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows linking issue, tabmail, new Mac theme, Gecko/platform planning, some XULRunner-based Mandelbrot fun, checkin comment rules, code style discussion, etc.

August 06, 2009 12:56 AM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.2 and Firefox 3.0.13 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.2 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.13 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.2 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.13 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.2 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

August 03, 2009 11:03 PM

Northern Sotho is an official language of South Africa, and you’ve probably guessed why I am blogging about it.  Thanks to the folks at Translate.org.za, Firefox is now available for use in this language (by way of an AMO Collection).

Since one of our localization community leaders, Dwayne Bailey, posted the following message via Facebook, I thought I would repost it on my blog.  Sorry for lifting the email and reposting if you’ve already read this note, but I’m hoping to provide maximum coverage.

“Are you a Sepedi speaker, Firefox user or able to help test a Pedi version of Firefox? Yes that probably means all of you

“This work is soon to be part of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) (http://www.africanlocalisation.net/) activities where we’ll be localising Firefox into a number of African languages. So your help here can help change the way Africans view the internet, create content, etc, etc. You’re about to change the world!

“OK testers here we go:

1. Make sure you have Mozilla Firefox. Visit http://www.mozilla.com and install Firefox if needed.
2. Start Firefox
3. Visit the Northern Sotho collection https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/northern-sotho
4. Install both the Northern Sotho language pack and the Locale Switcher
5. Restart Firefox
6. Change your user interface language by selecting: Tools -> Languages -> Northern Sotho
7. Restart Firefox

“Enjoy Firefox in Northern Sotho!  Whenever we update the translations you should get new copies.   Please provide any feedback on the Translate.org.za Facebook wall (or on Seth’s blog).

“If you would like to get involved in the actual translation or in fixing errors then please contact Dwayne via Facebook (or Seth’s Blog). If your interested we could have a Northern Sotho Firefox bug day at our offices and work at fixing any errors.  But most of all HAVE FUN!”

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July 31, 2009 02:33 PM

A while back, Tristan passed me a blog post by the Internet Explorer 8 team that announced the availability of IE8 in over sixty languages.  Their opening quote: “We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 in 20 additional languages today.  Internet Explorer 8 is now available in a total of 63 languages!”  That’s a nice accomplishment by their team and congratulations.

I went to their site to investigate how Microsoft offers downloads of their localized versions and noticed some distinctions between the Firefox and IE8 experience.

Most interesting for me off the bat, IE8 is offering some languages Firefox does not have, including Konkani, Kyrgyz, Malay, and Uzbek (Latin).  Those are the languages listed on their blog, but I am not sure if that is a comprehensive list of the differences, so I could use some help on determining where we fall short.  It’s hard for me to tell from the official download page, which lists eighty-five different “county/region” selections, bringing me to my next observation.

Microsoft asks in English for its users to select a “country/region” and operating system.  Then, they automatically send users to a localized download page.  That seems to be pretty nice, perhaps a user experience person could give me an opinion.  Looking at the list, I did see some Indian language fonts, indicating Indian versions, but I don’t know if that corresponds directly to a country or region.  Either way, the count in that drop down selector is around eighty-five.  Therefore, I don’t know if they offer sixty-three or eight-five localizations.  Either number is impressive.

In addition to all this, Microsoft’s “Worldwide Sites” page lists fifty-four “country-languages” for a user to select that will change the UI of the website to that country-language.  Mozilla does not distinguish based on country specifically; we simply list languages.  Interestingly, they have several versions of French available for France, Canada, Switzerland, and North Africa.  Mozilla lists only one version of French.

At Mozilla, we do not offer downloads based on “country/region” because we feel that it is best to showcase the language of the localization, not the geopolitical boundary.  For instance, in India, we have eleven different localization teams, so isolating downloads to country/region didn’t seem to get users exactly what they wanted.  Instead, we try to provide the best possible download by looking at the language of the browser in use at the moment of a visit to Mozilla for download and offering the version that matches that language.  If we cannot recognize the existing language, we have a series of fall-back options in our website code that tries to offer the best possible download.  If that doesn’t work, the en-US page provides an “Other Systems and Languages” link available just under the main download box.  That takes users to our all.html page where all of our localizations can be seen.

Just looking at the copy of the Microsoft download site, the IE8 team states that the browser is available in many “locales/languages”.  We use a bit different terminology in an attempt to distinguish the term “localization” from “language”.  For Mozilla, localizations are partly identified by the language of the UI.  But, a localization is customized to the region where the language is most prevalently spoken.  For instance, using our eleven Indian localizations as an example again, each team is able to customize their version of the browser so that web services like search or protocol handlers are packaged together in one download.  It may be a nuance, but for Mozilla, we try not to interchange language and localization.

Lastly, I am not quite sure how those sixty-three (eighty-five) languages are shipped to end-users.  Does Microsoft ship each version simultaneously? Or, are versions offered as “downloadable” packs after major release in Englsh?  In the past, I had heard that IE only ships one version (en-US) at the time of a major release.  But, I suspect that has changed, I just couldn’t find the information anywhere.  Please link me in the comments if you know.

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July 29, 2009 12:40 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 30/2009 (July 20 - 26, 2009):

• Release Process:
  I spent quite some time the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release this week again, the good news is that it was about setting the finishing touches and making the release public on Tuesday (missing the moon landing anniversary by just a day). Builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) could be delivered right from the first minute and what I wrote up in the announcement seems to be reflected in some media coverage we get.
• Build System and Release Harness:
  The version bump problem I found in Beta 1 work got reviews and could land once I had time after the release was public. With that and the beta release coming off it, I could mark the release harness as fixed.
  Build with mozilla-central now requite wireless-tools on Linux, I fixed the x86_64 box by installing those. Also mainly for the mozilla-central trees, I installed Java 6 on the Windows machines, this also fixed a leak that only had happened on a single machine but introduced a known leak that is fixed on mozilla-central but not 1.9.1 yet.
  As a side note, I should have the SeaMonkey 1.1 build machines up and running again, I'm still investigating an issue with the Linux box and its X server.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  Landed the the reworked 2.0 Beta 1 download page with the locale matrix and the download button figuring out the fitting language as well as OS.
• Statistics on Dev Site:
  From time to time, I like to play with my SeaMonkey development website and get resources up there that I think are helpful for our project. Last weekend, I created more elaborate weekly bug and release radar statistics to get a better view of current work in historic perspective and to get a better overview for release planning.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  14 locales plus US English shipped as official builds in 2.0 Beta 1, two shipped as experimental/unofficial with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time, but I think both should be up to making it for Beta 2. Overall, this beta was a good experience in terms of L10n, and I hope we'll get more locales joining in for the second beta and the final release.
• German L10n:
  Synched up with geolocation and mailnews string changes, discussed de community IRC meetings with Topal.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on blocklist, landing dlmgr search fix, tabmail, mozilla-central build problems, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, security updates for vulnerabilities disclosed at BlackHat, etc.

July 28, 2009 05:39 PM

Surely, you saw me fire off a response two weeks ago about playing politics with our Kiswahili localization communities.  Let’s move on from that flame war by summarizing our situation and presenting a path to a solution.

Presently, we have two communities, the tzLUG and the Kilinux teams, who have translated the Firefox application into Kiswahili (sw-TZ).  Unfortunately, we have had tough luck in getting an unbiased, thorough evaluation of each body of work to help us decide which one to use.  As it turned out, it was hard to find a number of individuals familiar enough with technical writing and Kiswahili who had time on their hands to volunteer for Mozilla.  Furthermore, we didn’t have an easy package to evaluate, except for the “diff” of the code differences between the two.  Yeah, that sounds ugly and it was.  Still is.

To solve what has become a long-standing debate, we asked each team leader to create a Mozilla language pack of their work as an add-on that we would then host on and promote though our addons.mozilla.org Web site.  Both teams agreed and uploaded their versions.  Since then, I created two separate “collections” that bundle each language pack with Ben Smedberg’s Locale Switcher addon.  Our hope is that end-users ready to test will install both versions and use the addons.mozilla.org site to provide feedback to each developer team.

If you are interested in testing each version, please install the following two collections:

• Kilinux:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.kilinux
• tzLUG:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.tzlug

Once you have installed these, you can switch between the two versions and your English interface by going to the menu item Tools –> Languages…

Now for testing…

Requirements: You must be able to read Swahili and English fluently and you must use Firefox.

If you choose to test these localization language packs, you’ll need to follow something similar to the “Firefox 3.5 Localizer Test Run” that has been created in Litmus, Mozilla’s testing application.  If you use Litmus, please follow the steps I have posted in the first comment on this blog post.

You can also just use each language pack and keep notes of errors you spot.  Whether you choose to use Litmus or not, please record any translation errors that you find in the user interface of each version.  Please be very descriptive and thorough with any notes you keep, and write the notes in English.  Take a look at the word choices, terminology, spelling, grammar, etc. and keep a record of errors you see.  When you are finished, you can submit your evaluation to me.  Just ping me on this blog.

As always, please ask some questions if you have them.  Nothing is off limits.

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July 24, 2009 12:57 AM

Not everything is picture perfect in the world of Mozilla localization.  Though it pains me to say that, we hit two snafus at the release of Firefox 3.5.  Here’s what happened with our Macedonian (mk) and Serbian (sr) localizations, complete with a mea culpa and a plan on how to fix things going forward.

On the day we released, our community found two very similar errors in our mk and sr builds.  In both cases, a misspelling of &brandShortName; inside an <!ENTITY> triggered the “the yellow screen of death” when users selected the Help -> Check for Updates… option to get the new version.

A thousand apologies to our localizers and mk and sr users for not catching these errors pre-release.

With damage control in full swing, we removed the two localizations from the Firefox 3.5 release channels so that users would not receive a broken version of Firefox. The two localizers and the l10n-drivers then worked through our options.  We could either release a special post-Firefox 3.5 Macedonian and Serbian version, or wait until the release of Firefox 3.5.1.

The unexpected timing of the Firefox 3.5.1 release helped us with the above decision.  Although the circumstances of the security update were not ideal, it did allow us to release mk and sr earlier than expected, getting users of those localizations back on the release track. Furthermore, any users who might have gotten the broken mk or sr version of Firefox 3.5 on release day will be updated behind-the-scenes without having to check for updates.  [1]

What happened on the 3.5 release day underscored a few errors in our system that need to be fixed. Here are the proposed and soon-to-be or already implemented measures we are taking to reduce this margin of error:

• Localization sign-off via the Web: Rather than opting-in with change sets, localizers will soon select the Mercurial change set they want to use for a release from a list of IDs pulled from their locale’s repository.  How does this help?  In Macedonian’s case, a localizer *had* submitted to Axel a change set that corrected the error prior to RC3.  However, Axel was unreachable at a conference and couldn’t relay that update to me.  Sadly, I submitted the incorrect change set.  Mea culpa.  This application allows localizers, l10n-drivers, and Firefox project managers to view the choices that have been made, and to the extent possible, test to make sure that the version the localizer wants is good for release.
• Test automation: We are working on creating a script that can be run by our QA team before each milestone that will scan for misspellings in things like &brandShortName;. This bug is tracking that progress.  Our QA team also is increasing the number of automated tests that will be run on each locale before each milestone release.
• L10n-testable builds: Presently, we are producing testable nightly builds with Axel’s l10n-merge code that will create localizations with en-US strings replacing any untranslated ones.  Now, localization teams can give their testing communities something to test from the beginning of the release process.  In the past, localizers had to wait until they had 100% translation before we provided them a nightly build.
• Localized builds with nightly updates: Added to the testable builds above, we’ll soon be able to offer nightly updates to localizers and their testing communities.  Right now, only en-US testers of Mozilla’s pre-release versions get nightly updates pushed to them.  Soon, *all* localizations will get these nightly updates pushed their way so our global testing community can see the most recent additions made by Mozilla’s developers.

These tools empower the localizers and the testing community, and we believe will help narrow our margin of error so that we don’t repeat what happened to our mk and sr builds.

Many thanks to our Macedonian and Serbian localization teams for their understanding and patience and sorry for the errors discovered at the time of the Firefox 3.5 release.

[1] Mozilla developer rstrong and his team fixed this bug and cleaned up a lot of code for the Firefox 3.5 release so that users of Firefox get updated behind-the-scenes without having to check for updates or get prompted unnecessarily if they want/need an update.

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July 23, 2009 01:31 AM

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.12 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from firefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.0.x users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.12 release notes.

Note: Firefox 3.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until January, 2010. All users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 by downloading it from firefox.com or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu when using Firefox 3.0.12.

July 22, 2009 12:41 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2009 (July 13 - 19, 2009):

• Build System and Release Harness:
  After some poking of release drivers, I could land the Mac unpacking fix on 1.9.1 so that L10n repackaging of Mac comm-1.9.1 nightlies and 2.0b1 builds could work. The botched checkin of the equivalent for release tools was fixed as well, so now we should be able to reliably unpack DMGs everywhere (would have been easier if Apple wouldn't create commandline tools that act asynchronously).
  We found a good solution for automatically removing debug UI from beta and final releases and I landed that also in time for Beta 1.
  When starting to run release automation I found out about a version bump problem with the release tools and created a patch to handle our special case.
• Release Process:
  The really big thing this week was working on the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release itself. The tracking bug and the Build Notes have a good amount of the story of how it went. I did run into a few small issues, including one obscure error that looks like a machine issue with one VM, but the release automation work done in the last weeks turned out to have been almost perfect, as that part performed like a charm. We have builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages now, as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) and we are all set for release from that point of view.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  I needed to come up with some new things for the 2.0 Beta 1 download page, as this is the first time we ship localized builds, and while I was at that, I included some small style improvements to the overall site, like highlighting headers when they are direct targets in the called URL.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Some significant work went into the opt-in process for the beta, where I took the time to do a fast productization review of all opted in revisions, which proved to be interesting as I also got to see all the websites of those locales that use custom homepages or bookmarks. We ended up with 15 locales opting in, one of which (hu) has over 450 obsolete strings which I disliked for releasing as official, but the others looked just good. One (pt-PT) had a complete and looking-good localization but failed to opt in. Because of that, we'll release the beta in 15 official languages (including en-US) and offer hu and pt-PT as "unofficial" one with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time.
• Various Discussions:
  Various version changes on websites and tools to support 2.0b2pre and 2.1a1pre nightlies, landing support for various shortcut keys in download manager, progress window accessibility, tabmail, getting old "-tbox" slaves into new buildbot pools, mac theme work, real and unreal FF 3.5 (Gecko 1.9.1) exploit reports, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, etc.

July 21, 2009 01:29 PM

July 19, 2009 07:53 PM

I ran into strange problems with the Mac builds of SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 (a step in the process that works flawlessly everywhere else hangs with very strange errors), but that shouldn't stop us from starting tests on the other two platforms that have builds available now.

So, please help us testing the available Windows installers and Linux packages, both available in 17 languages including US English!

I hope to sort out the Mac problems ASAP, we'll have disk images when those are solved and will get updates ready on the testing channels once all platforms have builds ready.

Update: Mac disk images are now available for all languages as well.

Update #2: Updates are available on the betatest channel.

July 18, 2009 01:47 PM

As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.5.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users as a free download from www.firefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox 3.5 users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.5.1 release notes.

Please note: If you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3.5 by downloading Firefox 3.5.1 from www.firefox.com.

July 17, 2009 02:34 AM

If you have the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 Schedule in mind, you know that by now, all the code and strings are fully frozen for this release, all we are waiting for is for additional L10n opt-ins until their deadline of midnight Pacific time today.

10 locales have opted in so far, 8 of those (be, de, fr, gl, pl, ru, sk, tr) are good to go, the other two (ca and hu) are not green on dashboard due to obsolete strings, they should just remove those and are good to go as well.

13 locales are green on dashboard, so 5 of those haven't opted in yet (cs, es-AR, lt, nb-NO, pt-PT) - if yours is one of them, please tell us which revision to use for release in the opt-in thread on the mozilla.dev.l10n group/list - 2 more locales (es-ES and nl) have just a handful of missing strings and also could make this release easily, but any opt-in needs to be there until midnight Pacific time, remember that. (The remaining 7 locales on dashboard, ja/ja-JP-mac, ka, pt-BR, ro, si, sv-SE, need a good amount of work to get ready, any locale not on dashboard yet please follow the process outlined in our wiki to get on for future releases.)

For me, this release will be special not only because we finally can release official localized builds and do that in sync with the en-US builds, but also because we'll be using release automation for the first time, the same hg- and buildbot-based tools Firefox is using for their releases. I just checked in a fix for repackaging localized builds on Mac, so all that tooling we need should be there and working now, but it's the first live run, so far I only did test runs of those tools. They will provide us with partial updates as well (for en-US only, as that's the only language for which we have an earlier release), so we have a number of firsts in this release from a build and release management point of view.

Of course, that only complements the firsts we have in the source, we have the same platform and web functionality as Firefox 3.5 (including the 3.5.1 security updates), the same mail and newsgroups backend as Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3 and about 130 SeaMonkey-specific fixes upcoming in this release.

I will start release automation early in the morning tomorrow, so localizers, remember to opt in today, and testers (including L10n testers!) be ready for candidate builds being available later in the day tomorrow (including updates on the betatest channel)!

July 16, 2009 01:52 PM

The about:mozilla newsletter feed has moved! If you are currently subscribed to the feed at the Mozilla Developer Center “DevNews” blog, you should instead subscribe to the feed at the newly-revamped about:mozilla weblog.

* New blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/about_mozilla/
* New feed: http://blog.mozilla.com/about_mozilla/feed/

Beginning today, the about:mozilla newsletter will be published on the new blog rather than through DevNews. Nothing else will change — email subscriptions will continue working, and the newsletter will still be syndicated to Planet. Thanks!

July 14, 2009 01:21 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 28/2009 (July 6 - 12, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  A series of patches for buildbot tooling concerning L10n repackaging and release automation for comm-central applications got reviews and landed during a Mozilla maintenance window (to ensure that Firefox machines would be undisturbed). I also landed configuration files for SeaMonkey release automation, so that we are mostly ready for using that harness for 2.0 Beta 1.
  The Mac unpackaging fix needs to land on 1.9.1 (I could land it on mozilla-central already and it performs well there) and the same for release tools needs to land correctly before we are fully ready.
  I also could do Phase II of switching new buildbot configs to production, now the SeaMonkey waterfall has builds based on mozilla-central, while the default builds based on 1.9.1 are on the SeaMonkey2.0 page.
  The fix for trunk Mac builds landed before doing that, as did the fix by Neil that also made the nightly update breakage go away, so things looked quite good for the trunk builds from the beginning, though I needed to switch off tests for Windows nightlies and enlarge the timeout for making build symbols to get the nightlies for Windows going there.
  In addition to all that, I did a patch for automatically removing debug UI from beta and final releases, which should land soon and be in place for Beta 1.
• Release Process:
  Continued uploading a few remaining contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.17.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  We could add Turkish to the SeaMonkey trunk locales, so that we now have 25 languages listed there, including US English. It will be interesting to see how many of them make the first automated simultaneous localized release in SeaMonkey history (2.0 Beta 1).
• German L10n:
  I kept up with the late-l10n change of the download manager prefs and mailnews search so that de should be good for beta 1.
• Various Discussions:
  Adding 2.1a1pre to AMO, DEL and other keys in download manager, Download manager pref panel, tabmail, getting Beta 1 into shape, etc.

July 14, 2009 12:18 AM

Mozilla Firefox’s localization count has grown each and every release over the years. I created the following to show just how much we’ve grown from launch to launch.

With the release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla added twenty-seven localizations and grew our locale count by 56.25%. Future versions of this graph might include an overlay that shows Firefox usage statistics for each of these locales. I’ll work with Ken Kovash to figure out some more ways to interesting present the data.

ShareThis

July 13, 2009 11:28 PM

The about:mozilla newsletter web feed is moving! If you are currently subscribed to the feed at the Mozilla Developer Center “DevNews” blog, you should instead subscribe to the feed at the newly-revamped about:mozilla weblog.

* New blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/about_mozilla/
* New feed: http://blog.mozilla.com/about_mozilla/feed/

Beginning next Tuesday morning, the about:mozilla newsletter will be published on the new blog rather than through DevNews. Nothing else will change — email subscriptions will continue working, and the newsletter will still be syndicated to Planet. Thanks!

July 09, 2009 03:10 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 27/2009 (June 29 - July 5, 2009):

• SeaMonkey Build/Release Harness:
  Phase I of switching new buildbot configs to production has been done, official nightlies are now coming from those.
  Automated updates stopped working, probably because of the first step for Phase II, using a different version number for mozilla-central builds, for which I apparently made a somewhat incomplete patch checked in.
  I also fixed up making repack independent of ChatZilla or venkman being enabled just before that large switch.
  The small patch for installer dealing with "pretty names" finally got into the tree, and I did put up a patch for a small fix for trunk Mac builds Mark pointed me to.
• Release Process:
  Continued uploading contributed builds for SeaMonkey 1.1.17.
• German L10n:
  Fixed some mailnews strings to keep the de locale green.
• Various Discussions:
  Talk on open source project management at an event of the local IT branch of the chamber of commerce, DEL and other keys in download manager, Download manager pref panel, tabmail, Firefox 3.5 release, etc.

July 07, 2009 06:24 PM

In this issue…

• New Mozilla accessibility projects
• Firefox 3.5 privacy features
• Spread Firefox affiliates program
• Join the Community Triage Team!
• Friday: Firefox security testday
• Firefox 3.5 launch t-shirt!
• Live tracking Firefox 3.5 adoption
• Firefox hacks, continued
• How to make community members stick
• Improving accessibility through ARIA
• Faces of the web video revolution
• What’s next for testdays
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

New Mozilla accessibility projects

Two new Firefox-related accessibility projects have been started, courtesy of special funding from the Mozilla Corporation. The first is a project by the Paciello Group to build upon their previous work towards making the Firebug developer tool more accessible, with a particular focus on the Firebug releases intended for use with Firefox 3.5. The second is a project by Silvia Pfeiffer to start the implementation phase of her project related to the accessibility of open video formats. Silvia previously produced a report on video accessibility issues with Ogg and related formats, and will be working with Chris Double and other developers to implement changes to Firefox’s new open video support. Frank Hecker has written about these two projects, and about the Mozilla accessibility strategy in general, in a recent post on his weblog.

Firefox 3.5 privacy features

Many people don’t realize that Firefox 3.5 includes several features devoted specifically to protecting and enhancing user privacy. Alex Faaborg has written about these features in some detail. “Now users have considerably more control over their privacy, both proactively and retroactively. There are five new privacy features introduced to Firefox with the 3.5 release.” These features include Private Browsing mode, Clear Recent History, Forget about this site, simplified privacy options, and control over what appears in the location bar search results. Alex’s post goes on to talk about user profiles as a privacy tool, as well as what’s next for Firefox and privacy.

Spread Firefox affiliates program

Since July 1st, 2009, every download you generate from your Firefox 3.5 Affiliate buttons gives you an opportunity to be rewarded as an active member of the Spread Firefox Affiliates Program. Everyone with more than five downloads in a quarter will be entered into a reward pool. We will randomly award ten individual Affiliates each quarter with rewards like a Flip video camera, an iPod Touch or Nano, Amazon gift certificates, and exclusive Top Fox t-shirts. Awardees will be notified by email, so please make sure your email address in Spread Firefox is up to date! For more information about this new rewards program, see Laura’s weblog post.

Join the Community Triage Team!

Carsten Book and Chris Hofmann are heading up the formation of a brand new Community Triage team to help identify Firefox crash and critical bugs. “Focus of this team should be on unconfirmed Crash (and Critical) bugs that are filed every day. Doing this daily allows us to find regressions/crashes sooner and faster and also allows us to create a testcase for this Crash before a site changes.” Many crash bugs are also frequently missing key information, and the triage team will help fill in those blanks to make a bug more useful. Bug triage is an absolutely vital task, and is a great way to get involved with Mozilla community and development. If you’re interested possibly joining this team, sign up on the mailing list.

Friday: Firefox security testday

MozQA is holding a Security Testday for Firefox 3.5 on Friday, July 10th. We have recently updated our security test cases and added some new ones for Firefox 3.5. The QA team will be available to help get you started and answer questions in the #testday channel on irc.mozilla.org, QMO forums, and dev-quality newsgroup. Security Testday is an all-day event, and is a really great way to get involved with Firefox development. More information, including how to prepare for the event, is available on the event page.

Firefox 3.5 launch t-shirt!

“Firefox 3.5 is finally here! And what better way to celebrate the launch than with the brand new 3.5 t-shirt. We had a lot of fun last year with an open call for designs that led us to the official Firefox 3 shirt. But this time around, we tried something different. Inspired by the concept of a tag cloud, we turned to the community for help in coming up with a collection of words that best described Firefox. We then used these words to create a stylized typographic visualization of what Firefox 3.5 is all about – highlighting some of the key features and goodness that’s baked into the browser.” You can buy the t-shirt over at the Mozilla Store, and read more about it at Tara’s weblog.

Live tracking Firefox 3.5 adoption

There are two interesting online applications that are tracking and displaying the total downloads and adoption of the recently released Firefox 3.5 browser. The first of these is brought to us by whos.amung.us, and it tracks overall marketshare of Firefox 3.5 in comparison to the other browsers, including Firefox 3. The second project was put together by Daniel Einspanjer, who built a site that displays recent and total downloads by country, as well as a live map displaying where people are downloading Firefox 3.5 in real-time.

Firefox hacks, continued

The Firefox Hacks team continues to bring us articles and demos for new Firefox 3.5 features. Recent articles include: synchronous XHR requests in Firefox 3.5, another great CSS media query demo, new CSS3 properties in Firefox 3.5, exploring music with the audio tag, and the text-shadow spotlight demo. Check out the Firefox Hacks weblog for all these new demos and more.

How to make community members stick

David Tenser has written a blog post in which he attempts to unravel some of the mystery behind building and growing communities — a topic very much at the heart of the Mozilla project and everything we do. Some of the motivators he identifies (through an examination of his personal experiences with Mozilla) include: a belief in the project’s mission, a feeling of belonging to the community, a desire to give something back, valuing the experience gained through participation, being recognized and appreciated for the contributions made, and feeling pride for being responsible for an important piece of the project. If you’re thinking about how to grow and develop the community around your project or piece of the project, David’s post is well worth reading.

Improving accessibility through ARIA

“Accessibility is a pretty hairy issue in web development. When attempting to determine if your site is accessible, there are so many standards and recommendations to follow. Well, now there is a new standard from the W3C called WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications). The simplest definition of ARIA is adding UI semantics via HTML element attributes. Simply, you add things to specific HTML elements to give screen readers a better understanding of your content.” Ryan Doherty has written an article that goes over four parts of the ARIA spec. “This is just a quick overview of ARIA and its uses, but I’m really excited about the possibilities it creates.” Read more at Ryan’s weblog.

Faces of the web video revolution

Robert O’Callahan writes, “There’s a lot of press these days about the HTML5 video tag and the struggle for universal unencumbered video and audio codecs — much of it associated with the Firefox 3.5 launch. I wonder how many people know that the Firefox video implementation is almost entirely due to just a few people in the Mozilla office in Newmarket (New Zealand) — Chris Double, Matthew Gregan, Chris Pearce, and to a lesser extent, me. (Justin Dolske did the controls UI, but I’m not sure where he lives!)” Robert goes on, “It’s a great privilege to have the opportunity to really shake up the world for the better, with a very small team, in a relatively small amount of time.”

What’s next for testdays

Aakash Desai is looking for feedback and input about how Mozilla Testdays could be changed and improved. “I’m pretty proud of the work that’s been done so far by the Mozilla QA community since we re-started Testdays on a bi-monthly basis. With that said, what would you like to see out of Testdays that you haven’t seen already? I’d love to hear anything, especially comments and concerns, about what the Mozilla community has seen so far and would like/like not to see again!” Read Aakash’s full post and leave your feedback and ideas on his weblog.

Upcoming events

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday
* Wed, Jul 15 – Mountain View – Mozilla Crash Reporting and Analysis
* Fri, Jul 24 – Munich – Open Source Meeting
* Fri, Jul 24 – Online – Testing a Mozilla Web Property
* Fri, Aug 7 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill 1.2
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla

about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

July 07, 2009 12:14 PM

Although I got into the mozilla project through en-user documentation and support around 2001, I really got involved in Web localization in 2003 when I started to build a Spanish Mozilla community around the Mozilla Suite and I convinced Bob Clary (who also gave me my canconfirm rights in bugzilla, thanks for that!) to publish a page in Spanish on mozilla.org so as to promote Tech Evangelism activities in Spanish.

That was the first non-English page on an official mozilla site ever and the funny thing is that... this page is still online! 

We are now in July 2009 and we just shipped Firefox 3.5 in more than 70 languages, all with a set of in-product pages hosted on mozilla.com. But more than in-product pages, we now have with this release a localized home page on mozilla.com for ALL of our locales!

Now that the release is done and millions of users are downloading the best version of Firefox ever every day, I have some time to thank all of the people that have made such an achievement possible.

Thank you to our localizers first, without them, the Mozilla project would not have the international outreach it has and I really think that our localizers are way more than translators, they are involved in every corner of mozilla activities, from code, to marketing and documentation. It is a privilege for us to work with people having so many skills and passionate about FLOSS and the open web!

Thank you also to the rest of the l10n-drivers team (Seth, Axel, Stas, Gandalf...) and thank you to Delphine who did an awesome job with QA of all of the localized pages over the past weeks on our sites!

Happy international browsing

Pascal

July 02, 2009 01:33 PM

Those who read this blog may remember that we are trying to finalize a version of Firefox in Swahili.  As it happens now and again, we have two groups who have completed translations at nearly the same time.  The l10n-drivers team is now trying to find the most judicious solution to the problem: determining fairly which translation is best and shipping that.  Amazingly, the differences between the the strings for the two localizations number in the thousands, and properly evaluating the discrepancies is a sizable undertaking for us to find the better version of the two.  If you’d like to see the existing diff, comment here and we’ll send it your way.  Now that we have a finalized Firefox 3.5, I’ve asked each team leader to update the strings in their language pack for final evaluation and we’ll prepare the final diff.

Sadly, amidst all we have done to ship Firefox to seventy-five locales, it was frustrating to read a blog post from one person suggesting that Mozilla’s l10n-drivers team is playing politics when it comes to shipping the Swahili version.  If it needs to be made explicitly clear, we are in the business of shipping excellent localized software to as many locales as possible.  If our team allowed politics to disrupt prudent judgment, I am not sure we would scale at all.

In his post, huarya writes, “The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!”.  I responded extensively in the comment thread, an d here is a copy of my lengthy response for those who care to read it:

huayra:  I’m not sure if we have ever spoken personally, so it seems a bit careless to suggest that we are playing politics.  If we have spoken via email or IRC, then my apologies.  You can find me on irc.mozilla.org, nick: sethb.

July 02, 2009 10:10 AM

In this issue…

• Firefox 3.5 now available
• Firefox Hacks
• Discover Shiretoko
• Firefox in context
• Weave 0.4 released
• Two new Fennec releases
• Firefox browser for CyberMentors
• Open Video Conference roundup
• Mozilla Service Week
• Design Challenge: vote now!
• Upcoming events
• Developer calendar
• About about:mozilla

Firefox 3.5 now available

Firefox 3.5 has been released and is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux in more than 70 languages. This release represents the hard work, dedication, and perseverance of thousands of contributors throughout the Mozilla community and around the world.

Firefox 3.5 has a huge number of additions and improvements for both users and web developers alike, including: robust new user privacy features; support for high quality open video and audio; a new, high performance JavaScript engine (and a host of other performance and speed improvements); downloadable fonts that will fundamentally change how we view typography and the web; powerful new developer features such as location aware browsing, canvas features, worker threads, native JSON, and media queries; and so much more. Firefox 3.5 is essentially an upgrade to the Web itself.

Mike Beltzner, Firefox Product Director, stars in this quick video introduction to Firefox 3.5. Visit GetFirefox.com for more information about and to download this release.

Firefox Hacks

The Firefox Hacks team continues to focus on the new features that are part of Firefox 3.5, posting an article and demo every day. Recent posts include: Open video codecs and quality, a short introduction to media queries, 3d transforms, better security and performance with native JSON, and HTML5 video and the web. Check out the Firefox Hacks weblog to read about all of these new features and more.

Discover Shiretoko

Mozilla Japan has started a new “Discover Shiretoko” campaign in cooperation with the non-profit Shiretoko Nature Foundation in Hokkaido, Japan. “As some of you may know, each version Firefox has a code-name that is the name of a national park. The code name for Firefox 3.5 is ‘Shiretoko’ which is taken from the name of the Shiretoko National Park in Northern Japan. Mozilla and this organization have a number of common goals and you can read 4 stories about Firefox and Shiretoko on the Discover Shiretoko site.” The team is also running a new web banner campaign, featuring a unique and creative use of the Canvas element to grow a virtual tree on your website or blog. Read Foxkeh’s weblog to find out more.

Firefox in context

Mitchell Baker has written an article that talks about Firefox in context of Mozilla’s larger mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet. “Firefox enables the web and web applications to be ever more robust and exciting. The web enables Firefox to be more flexible, more agile and more responsive. Firefox builds an experience where the center of the entire system remains a person. Not a website, not a business, not a piece of software. The most important actor in the entire picture is a human being; an individual. You. Me. Each person living part of his or her life online.” Read Mitchell’s full post on her weblog.

Weave 0.4 released

Weave Sync is a prototype add-on that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser. This new release includes a major rewrite of many of Weave’s key components since the last major release in June. For more information, see the Weave 0.4 release announcment.

Two new Fennec releases

Stuart Parmenter has announced the release of Fennec 1.0 Beta 2 for Maemo and Fennec 1.0 Alpha 2 for Windows Mobile. “For these releases we have worked on improving the user experience, replacing our old theme with a much nicer looking one and fixing numerous usability issues. We’ve continued to increase performance and responsiveness.” Other changes include how add-ons are installed, how the download manager works, and several improvements to web forms.

Firefox browser for CyberMentors

Jane Finette has posted about Mozilla’s involvement with the UK-based charity that works to help Britain’s youngsters deal with and protect themselves from bullying. “Earlier this year they launched their CyberMentors program, offering help and advice from trained mentors to anyone who is being bullied online. Mozilla supported CyberMentors straight out of the gates, whereby members of the Mozilla community volunteered to be trained as CyberMentors. Yesterday, we took our partnership a stage further for this worthwhile cause by building and launching a new custom Firefox browser for CyberMentors.” To learn more about this project, see Jane’s weblog post.

Open Video Conference roundup

Mark Surman posted an interesting round up of the goings-on and takeaways from the Open Video Conference that took place recently in New York. “It was an amazing confluence of people from the worlds of online video, art, free culture, open content and web technology.” Mark’s takeaways, summarized, are: “people who make video are great potential allies”, “we have a long way to go”, “there are some simple things we can do now to build momentum”, and finally “open video is both important and fun”. Mark’s post finishes up with some potential next steps, and you can read it in full over at his weblog.

Mozilla Service Week

There are two new stories about the exciting new Mozilla Service Week project that’s taking place Sept 14-21. The first article asks that non-profit and community organizations that are in need of technology help get in touch with Mozilla, so your organization can be included in the program. If you already have ideas about what sort of help you need, you can register directly at the Idealist volunteer organization. The second post is about how individuals can get involved with and get a head start on the Service Week. The team is looking for help promoting the Mozilla Service Week event over the summer, both to volunteers worldwide and to non-profits and local organizations that could use help. For more information, check out both articles: Public benefit organizations: How can we help you?, and Mozilla Service Week: How to help!

Design Challenge: vote now!

The submission deadline for the Mozilla Labs Summer ‘09 Design Challenge has passed, and over 120 concepts have been submitted around the theme of reinventing tabs in the browser. The nine panelists will be going through the submissions and determining the four “best in class” honors, but there’s an additional honor to be bestowed, and we need your help! You can participate by going to the Design Challenge showcase site, reviewing the concepts, and voting for your favorite to help determine which entry should receive the “People’s Choice” award. Voting closes on July 5th, so now’s a great time to start checking out some of the incredible work that’s been submitted for this Challenge. More information is available on Pascal’s weblog post.

Upcoming events

The Mozilla community is organizing an increasing number of events and meetups all the time, and we include a list of these here every week. If you have events you would like listed, send them along to: about-mozilla*at*mozilla.com.

* Fri, Jul 10 – Online – Firefox 3.5 Security Testday
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla

about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

June 30, 2009 04:03 PM