Planet Mozilla L10N

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2010 (February 1 - 7, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.3 builds, which are now available on FTP as well as the beta update channel for testing by our community, offering well over 100 bug fixes. If things go well, we should be able to release this update in sync with Firefox 3.5.8 on February 16th.
  The 2.0.x nightlies now carry a 2.0.4pre version number, but we have no firm schedule for the following updates yet (will coordinate with Firefox, possibly also Thunderbird drivers on that).
  Work on 2.0.3 also included putting up a first version of the release notes.
  I also tried to let the release process generate 64bit builds for Linux this time, those are fully experimental and will only appear as "contributed" builds though, they have no official status at all.
• Build Infrastructure:
  The move of our core buildbot master code to a shared location could be completed, Thunderbird will look into using the same code in the future and we closely mirror the Firefox setup now, making it easier for people patching their side to fix ours as well (and the other way round).
  Revision reporting on packaged tests is now both generic and respecting applications that are built from different repositories as the platform (like SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).
  Additionally, I continued working with Mozilla teams to get SeaMonkey data up on the graph server, which needed a firewall rule and a correction on the staging server's database, but testing looks good now and we should be able to go live on the real server soon.
• Download Progress Windows:
  I created screen shots of some additional proposals for improving the progress windows, requested ui-review on them to see which one wins out with our "UI tsar", and finally implemented the winning proposal in a patch, which should be very close to positive review by now.
• Build System, Packaging:
  After a few runs on the Mozilla Messaging try server, I could finalize the patch for merging our package manifests and also make Mac use a manifest, get reviews and check it in.
  Another patch I worked on is about making branding usage fit Mozilla standards more closely, which should also ease the life of people wanting to ship suite versions with a different branding than the official "SeaMonkey" trademark designs.
  Some discussions about build system variables reminded me that I should re-test and attach the papering-over patch for mailnews Qt port bustage which I've had locally for quite some time now.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Starting with SeaMonkey 2.0.3, the language packs are marked compatible with all 2.0.* versions.
  Also with this release, Japanese is joining the collection of officially available localizations.
  This was also the first time I played with and used the new L10n sign-off dashboard for a release - further opt-ins / sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.0.x will all run through this tool now. See the m.d.l10n thread for more details on using this tool.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, new machines, FOSDEM, places history changes, module ownership, mozilla.org planning and "Mozilla" vs. "Firefox" websites, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, langpacks and switching, etc.

I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.

February 08, 2010 09:40 PM

I’ll be presenting at FOSDEM on l20n, the infrastructure that we’re hoping to move our localization efforts to. The talk will be in the Mozilla Developers room on Sunday, 13:15. The FOSDEM program might still give a Sunday morning time, that changed.

I’ll focus on what tools can do to help localizers to use the power that l20n brings, without making things totally obscure. I’ll start with a quick recap for those that are new to it, and then discuss the challenges that l20n brings, and how tools can help. I’ll also present first thoughts on how to communicate data describing languages between tools, using html5 and microdata.

See you in Brussels, not just for that talk, of course.

PS: I’ll be giving a lightning talk on the new l10n site, too.

February 05, 2010 11:26 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 04/2010 (January 25 - 31, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  I installed a newer gcc on the Linux machines and started using it for trunk builds. Additionally, I synched our mozconfig files for trunk much more to what Firefox is running on trunk as well.
  Because I might be a bit crazy and like to put our machines under more pressure than they should be under, I even tried to turn on one additional test suite on trunk to try and find bugs to fix.
  I also helped Armen from Mozilla release engineering to get his current L10n build work into a shape so that it works fine with SeaMonkey/Thunderbird builds as well.
  Last not least, I filed a bug on disappearing Windows slaves - seems like we've overused the space available on our Parallels server.
• Packaging:
  As we want to run packaged tests on Mac some time, we will need to turn on tests on normal builds there, but need to care that the test files don't end up in file we deliver to users. That and us probably being the only ones who haven't done it yet was enough motivation for me to finally look into merging our package manifests and use one preprocessed file for all (three!) main platforms. I got all the way to having the "browser" section complete, based on the Firefox manifest and our current Linux/Windows ones, now I just need to do the sections for mail and all the other stuff we don't nearly have in common with Firefox - and then get this sucker tested and reviewed!
• Support Emails:
  Even if I tell people that I'm not the person to contact for support, a number of emails about that topic end up in my mailbox nevertheless, some directly, some via seamonkey-council. I tend to move them into a folder and batch-handle all of them every few weeks - or rather months. This week, it was time to do such a pass again, and I sent about 70-80 replies to them (I try to leave nobody without an answer), even though most of those are just one sentence and a templated section to look at our community page to find better and more responsive soruce for support.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, geolocation service options, new machines, getting codesighs and leak test data on graphs server, KompoZer integration work, L10n dashboard and sign-off, future add-ons UI, etc.

A good part of this week did run into various discussions and more buildbot tweaks, things are moving forward positively from all I'm seeing - we just need to get some more real development done on trunk, even though that slowly starts to pick up now. Any help to make SeaMonkey 2.1 an even better suite than 2.0 is appreciated, of course!

February 01, 2010 10:16 PM

January 31, 2010 12:02 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 03/2010 (January 18 - 24, 2010):

• Build Infrastructure:
  A lot of more work on L10n nightly updates until I finally got then to work. Note that any SeaMonkey nightly updates are complete updates only, as the tooling to do partials for nightlies on our normal build machine pools is not done yet, currently waiting on Mozilla RelEng there. Getting our nightly updates to work correctly needed changes across 3-4 repositories (including mozilla-central and comm-central), but everyone was cooperative and it ended up great.
  The next step I had on my mind was switching to packaged tests, both for being nearer to what Firefox run and making it possible to run test suite in parallel, esp. as mochitest-plain runs really long. To my surprise, this worked well, I needed only one small change to the generic test factory and it worked for SeaMonkey (I later coded up an improvement to report Mozilla revisions, but things worked fine without it) and tests did run fine except for a mailnews xpcshell problem, which I hope will be dealt with soon. With that, I could officially do the switch for the most part.
  I also did experimentally create some hourly builders to run on a 1.9.2 tree, which we don't really want to target for SeaMonkey, but want to at least build fine. I spotted a packaging problem that was a regression form a recent build system port and Serge swiftly fixed that one - thanks for that!
  And, as I now know how to deal with packaged tests and in the new architecture we should run them on normal debug and even optimized builds, I turned on the xpcshell test suite for SeaMonkey trunk Linux builds (the debug ones we do for leak testing), even if a number of failures show up there - it's the first step to fixing them. A one-cycle test run of the other suites pointed to some more issues to fix, but we don't have the machine power right now to run them all the time.
• Download Progress Windows:
  After some proposals have come up for fixing progress window shortcomings, we were looking for icons that were usable under our licenses, and when those failed to materialize, I went and created my own SVG icons to match the small ones we have right now, so I could produce larger versions. Having done that, I worked on patching the dialog and posted screen shots of this work in progress in the bug.
  Back when I did the version of those windows that is in 2.0 right now, I did the fastest solution I could while still applying a design facelift, now for 2.1 we should have the time to improve on that and correct problems we see with this 2.0 design.
  I also updated my patch for moving core build master code to a shared place.
• History Expiration:
  I'm risking the next flame war against me with this, but I did a patch to react to the places expiration rework done for the whole Mozilla platform, which also removes the ability to limit history to a fixed number of days or sites, but instead goes with a memory percentage. We will need to implement the cleaning up private data based on time frames to complement this to at least reduce the complaints, I think. While working on this, I saw that Thunderbird also has prefs for this around and filed a bug for them as well.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  As mentioned above, L10n nightly updates for SeaMonkey trunk work now, I posted to the L10n newsgroups about this as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on compatibility communication, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, nightly.m.o, possible platform roadmap options, Firebug 1.5 release, Firefox 3.6 release, external linkage for mailnews, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, YouTube and "HTML5 video" vs. Ogg, community-based geolocation service, etc.

This has been a really productive week again and it feels good to get real things moving and also start to do work and planning for SeaMonkey 2.1 now, turning the head back and putting out fires on 2.0 was really getting tedious - even though we have a slightly conservative approach here in SeaMonkey land, we are as much about progress and innovation as the rest of the Mozilla project (even if it is in our way and sometimes means the some changes are not as much into-your-face and revolutionary as in other projects but have more of a continuity label on them).
I hope we all can get into this more again now and get some exciting patches landed for the next version of our great suite.

January 25, 2010 04:36 PM

January 24, 2010 11:55 PM

The Mozilla community is proud to announce that Firefox 3.6 has shipped and is now available for free download at www.firefox.com. Firefox 3.6 and the new Gecko 1.9.2 platform were built by a global community of passionate contributors, including thousands of experienced developers, security experts, localization and support communities, and hundreds of thousands of active testers.

What’s new in Firefox 3.6:

Below are some of the new features in Firefox 3.6:

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

What’s New Under the Hood for Developers

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages
• See more complete information in this article for web and software developers

How to get Mozilla Firefox 3.6:

Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in more than 70 languages – more platforms and languages than any other browser! You can download Firefox 3.6 at www.firefox.com.

January 22, 2010 06:07 AM

I've been working on this for a few days now - and with some teak of last night it finally started working:

Localized nightlies for SeaMonkey "trunk" (i.e. those from latest-comm-central-trunk-l10n) now get automated updates, just like the US English ones do!

Of course, you'll only get an update if one is available, but string changes in Mozilla or SeaMonkey areas should not pose problems, our build system "merges" localizations for nightlies with the US English strings, so that you just will see untranslated strings where the localizer still has work to do.

In case ChatZilla or venkman have missing strings, we will break in the build stage and not produce nightlies or updates, though, as the "l10n-merge" process is currently unable to deal with those extensions.

I hope nightly testers will be happy and our localizations will get even more testing even before we ship alphas, betas or releases!

January 21, 2010 03:03 PM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing security and stability update process, Thunderbird 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getthunderbird.com/.

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

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Thunderbird release notes.

January 20, 2010 05:50 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 02/2010 (January 11 - 17, 2010):

• Releases:
  SeaMonkey 2.0.2 was released on Monday, mainly fixing a Windows mailcompose freeze which was a regression from 2.0.1 work. The previous 2.0.2 scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3 and moved to the middle of that month.
• Build Infrastructure:
  I finally attacked the problem of L10n nightlies not being triggered and for that moved right over to mirroring the Firefox setup as closely as possible. After fixing a glitch from some wrong variable-repurposing for WinCE build work, it was a success in that our new config allows us to go for things like split test cycles much more easily and that L10n nightlies are being produced, but I needed to split L10n nightly updates into a different bug and do some more work on that - and we're not completely there yet.
  Also, the release automation bustage fix found with 2.0.2 work could be checked in, as well as the switch of release automation to pulling chatzilla from hg, which I now found time to write a patch for.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  I finally came around to activating Italian ChatZilla and venkman, and Ukrainian SeaMonkey.
  As said above, work is going on for L10n nightly updates - right now, everything is actually working except that a wrong patch is being written into the snippets and so no update can be installed, even though builds know that it's available. I'm working on fixes for that (needs work across three Mercurial repositories).
• German L10n:
  To have something for reasonably testing the L10n building updates on trunk, I wanted German to build alright, so I went in and finally updated ChatZilla and venkman localizations, and while I was at it, DOM inspector and SeaMonkey as well. I also did small updates to DOM and security to sync them to current trunk development, but toolkit still needs a bit more work to be green on trunk.
• Various Discussions:
  Add-on compatibility center, new machines, comm-central policy for requiring tests, plans or no plans for platform releases, Lightning 1.0 Beta 1 release, external linkage for mailnews, Manifesto and privacy, profile management future, KompoZer and SeaMonkey, etc.

Work is definitely picking up, and I've also started trying the Mozilla Status Board tool, which will not replace but be an addition to my updates here - with the benefit of having a section of what I'm planning to do next. And my list of "next" items was quite large last week, I'll probably need to keep a few on that list this time as well...

January 18, 2010 07:52 PM

An update to the Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate is now available. This second release candidate is available for free download and has been issued as an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 Beta and Release Candidate users.

More information about the Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate can be found in the release notes and detailed information for developers can be found at the Mozilla Developer Center. As always, the Mozilla community would appreciate hearing about any feedback you have about this release, or any bugs you may find.

January 17, 2010 11:12 PM

Il est possible de tester (sous Linux) Firefox avec un profil temporaire sans avoir à en créer un depuis le gestionnaire de profils puis avoir à faire du nettoyage. C'est intéressant par exemple si on veut rapidement tester une régression et qu'on veut être sûr que ce n'est pas lié à un problème de profil, ou bien si on a un profil très personnalisé (genre plein de modifications dans about:config) et qu'on ne veut pas les réinitialiser juste pour un test.

Pour cela, il faut lancer Firefox en ligne de commande et utiliser le paramètre -Profile qui pointe vers un dossier vide existant situé où vous voulez sur le disque.

ex:

firefox -Profile /home/pascal/temp/profile

Voici un exemple de fichier bash qui vous permettra de lancer un firefox de développement avec un profil temporaire :

#!/bin/bash

# chemin du profil temporaire
target=${HOME}'/tempmoz/'

# chemin de Firefox
fx=${HOME}'/applis/Firefox-Trunk/firefox'

echo "== Lancement de Firefox dans un profil temporaire =="
mkdir $target
$fx -Profile $target --no-remote
echo "Effacement du profil temporaire à la fermeture de Firefox"
rm -rf $target
echo "Profil temporaire effacé"

L'option --no-remote vous permettra d'ouvrir ce Firefox en parallèle d'un autre Firefox déjà ouvert, votre Firefox dans une version stable avec votre profil habituel par exemple.

January 14, 2010 07:40 AM

January 13, 2010 04:48 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 01/2010 (January 4 - 10, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared a 2.0.2 update this week, containing a very small set of fixes over 2.0.1, most importantly a fix for freezes in composing emails on Windows when the OE Contacts address book is present.
  Along with that short-cycled update, the previously planned 2.0.2 release scheduled for early February was renamed to 2.0.3.
  Unfortunately, the automated release process didn't perform completely without problems this time, I ran into a timeout with our mini as well as some bustage from a recent infrastructure update and did a patch for the latter.
  In the end, I got candidate builds and beta channel updates out on Tuesday evening, and could prepare all website changes by Sunday for a Monday release.
• Add-Ons:
  We're trying to encourage add-on authors to make their work compatible with SeaMonkey 2.0. Most of the work for that is being done on our side by Philip Chee, e.g. for sending out messages.
  We also would like to get an add-ons compatibility center set up on AMO though, and I prepared "SeaMonkey 2.0" wordmark images for that.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  After the 2.0 release, we have been pointed to a license problem with packaging dictionaries into language packs, which we worked around in the recent releases, but for the future (beginning with 2.0.3), we're not shipping dictionaries in langpacks to resolve this. We now are only packaging the chrome localization, perfectly matching what Firefox does. This also makes it easier to merge more of the build processes across Mozilla applications in the future.
  If you are using language packs and want the matching dictionary installed in the future, fetch it from AMO - which makes it even available if you switch between languages.
  The fully localized builds are not affected and still contain the matching dictionary (if available under the MPL from Mozilla repositories), by the way.
• Various Discussions:
  L10n build infrastructure, close button on tabs, build system porting, AIX port, extension dependencies, future of theme and extension systems, external linkage for mailnews, etc.

With my dad's birthday in the middle of the week, I once again spent most of the week at home with my parents and didn't get around to a whole lot of work, but still tried to start picking up the pace at least somewhat - with a priority on shipping the mail compose freeze fix to Windows users in the 2.0.2 update.
As of right now, I'm back to a normal working schedule, and starting to think more and more about where to go with 2.1, both in terms of features and code work as well as timing. Unfortunately, I don't see the Firefox "Lorentz" story finalized as of now, but timing of the next Gecko/platform releases plays a critical role in our own release planning. I hope to see some light shed on those matters soon.

January 12, 2010 11:46 AM

The Mozilla community is proud to announce the availability of a release candidate of Firefox 3.6. This preview software is available for free download and has been issued as an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 beta users. Over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6. If your favorite Add-on isn’t yet marked as compatible, you can help the Add-on author test it out using the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. This release candidate may update itself periodically, and will eventually be exactly the same as the final Firefox 3.6 release itself.

Firefox 3.6 (built on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform) introduces several new features for users and developers:

• Users can change the browser’s appearance with a single click using Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history.
• 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.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• Support for the HTML5 File API.
• 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 of Firefox 3.6 see this list (it’s big).

If you’d like to get a sneak peek at Firefox 3.6, please download the release candidate and try it out!

If you already have Firefox 3.6 Beta, you should be automatically updated to the release candidate. You can also choose to manually “Check for Updates” from the Help menu.

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

January 11, 2010 06:50 AM

Juste avant la nouvelle année,  je bloguais sur les bugs que j'avais rapportés en décembre concernant Firefox et j'apportais quelques réflexion sur la participation des utilisateurs Linux aux projets libres qu'ils utilisent et sur le bêta-test en général (Bêta-test Firefox: mes bugs de décembre).

Quel est donc le statut de ces bugs aujourd'hui ?

• [résolu] Bug 532721 - CSS Gradient backgrounds are not repainted when DOM is changed
• [résolu] Bug 531289 - Firefox doesn't obey system dpi settings anymore
• [résolu] Bug 536631 - Firefox no longer detects rss feed
• [résolu] Bug 536843 - Flash plugin has display problems on Firefox Linux Trunk and 3.6 builds, regression
• [en attente] Bug 534767 - New Drag and Drop JS API does not work with Jetpack installed

Les quatre bugs Linux ont été résolus et n'affecteront donc ni Firefox 3.6 ni le futur 3.7. Le dernier bug n'affecte pas le navigateur directement mais est très probablement un bug Jetpack (qui en est en version 0.7), ça ne bloque donc pas une sortie logicielle.

Je suis heureux d'avoir pu contribuer à la qualité de la version Linux de Firefox juste par ce simple bêta-test de décembre, la rapidité de réponse des développeurs a été très impressionnante, un grand merci à eux !

La bonne nouvelle c'est que je n'ai pas trouvé d'autres régressions, j'ai tout de même rapporté deux autres petits bugs mineurs, l'un est un bug d'interface Gnome et l'autre un léger bug de rendu:

• Bug 538319 -  white line around search and url fields that disappears if you hover the field with the mouse
• Bug 538383 -  -moz-box-shadow does not follow rounded borders correctly defined by -moz-border-radius

Autre bonne nouvelle, des gens ont commenté sur mon billet précédent pour rapporter leurs propres problèmes et j'ai pu inciter l'un deux à ouvrir son premier bug ! (  Bug 536996 -  nsISound is broken (Linux)  ) Ce bug est activement travaillé et a déjà 37 commentaires. Un grand merci également donc à Moktoipas pour avoir pris la peine de rapporter son bug et d'y adjoindre un testcase.

Quelle conclusion tirer de tout cela ? :

• Si on veut que la qualité de Firefox sous Linux soit bonne, il faut rapporter les bugs dès qu'on les voit ! Je suis  surpris que plusieurs personnes m'aient dit après coup qu'ils avaient aussi constaté le bug avec Flash ainsi que celui des gradients mais qu'ils n'avaient pas vu l'intérêt de signaler la régression. "C'est tellement gros que ça sera rapporté" pour citer un ami dont je tairai le nom Le problème c'est que si tout le monde pense que le voisin rapportera le bug pour lui, en fin de compte personne ne rapporte rien. C'est particulièrement important sous Linux, nous sommes déjà à la base peu nombreux mais en plus nous ne sommes qu'une poignée à utiliser des versions en développement, il faut absolument que l'on soit réactifs sur les régressions !
• Nous nous trouvons dans une situation paradoxale.  Le nombre de bêta-testeurs sous Windows devient absolument gigantesque (en époque de Release Candidate on approche du million de bêta-testeurs sous Windows) et en plus ces gens sont enthousiastes et ravis que nous les invitions à participer à du logiciel libre (ce qui est une excellente nouvelle pour le libre à mon avis). Parallèlement à cela, nous avons beaucoup de mal à avoir des bêta testeurs sous Linux en grande partie parce que nos canaux de communication habituels sont remplacés par ceux de la distro lors de l'empaquetage. On a incité nos utilisateurs à bêta tester sur la page de démarrage, les notes de version, nos pages de mise à jour ont des sondages trimestriels... Hors les distros lors de la personnalisation de Firefox remplacent les liens vers ces pages par des pages de promo de la distro. Il nous faut donc réfléchir à de nouveaux canaux de communication vers le monde Linux puisque ceux que nous avions intégrés dans Firefox sont supprimés pour les versions empaquetées. La création du planète Mozilla francophone et mes billets maintenant syndiqués sur planet-libre.org sont ma petite contribution à cet effort. J'ai d'autres idées à ce sujet mais je vais les laisser mûrir avant d'en parler

January 09, 2010 03:46 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 53/2009 (December 28, 2009 - January 3, 2010):

• Build Machines:
  While cleaning up some part of my email structure for the switch to the new year, I finally filed a few bugs on things I've had on my mind for some time now:
  Not shipping dictionaries with langpacks was the outcome of a license debate after the 2.0 release, I also did a patch for that but didn't come around to checking it in yet due to being on and off all the time currently.
  Once we know we won't ship releases from a point before the switch of ChatZilla to hg any more, we can also switch releases for that, but 2.0.2 has been short-cycled based on the pre-switch 2.0.1 release.
  Some localizers pointed to L10n builds not being generated daily, I need to figure this out soon, possibly together with L10n nightly updates.
  Since the recent Parallels upgrade, one of our Mac VMs has been running in the original 2-CPU configuration again and didn't show problems, so we can switch back the remaining ones as well. If that turns out fine, the Parallels experiment might still find a positive outcome.
  That could very much influence getting machines for a third SeaMonkey tree next to trunk and 1.9.1, as Parallels might be a viable option again now.
  And I requested signing infrastructure though I'm not yet completely sure what exactly we need there.
• German L10n:
  Just in time for the 10-year anniversary of German Mozilla releases, I dug out the first packages I created for M12 and M13 as well as the (English-only) announcements and put them up on the German SeaMonkey website so other people might indulge in nostalgia as well.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), profile manager UI, external linkage for mailnews, Callek coming back to the intarwebs, etc.

This was another week in which I kept a low profile on work, spending some time with friends and doing some maintenance on my data - all of which are things I hope help turn out things well in this just-started year, which will host a nice anniversary for the SeaMonkey project - we're turning five years old!

January 07, 2010 01:54 PM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.7 and Firefox 3.0.17 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.7 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.17 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 3.5.7 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.17 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3 users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu in Firefox 3.0.17.

January 05, 2010 11:40 PM

January 04, 2010 11:25 AM

Un nouveau thème pour mon blog, entièrement fait main, dans les tons sombres pour changer et beaucoup moins encombré que les thèmes précédents que j'utilisais, en plus, il s'affiche même correctement dans IE6 sans que j'ai rien eu à faire !

January 03, 2010 02:45 AM

Je me suis pas mal amusé ces derniers temps avec les nouvelles possibilité des CSS (angles arrondis, ombres de boîtes et de texte, dégradés de couleur) pour voir ce qu'il était possible de faire avec ces nouveaux outils. L'intérêt de ces règles CSS c'est qu'elles permettent très souvent d'améliorer facilement un site web existant à peu de frais sans pour autant casser le site pour des navigateurs plus anciens (et par anciens navigateurs, j'inclus Firefox 3, Opera 10, Safari 3, les versions de Chrome vieilles de plus de 6 mois... )

Ces règles sont parmi les règles CSS les plus intéressantes car le dégradé est un effet courant sur le web et les faire par css permettra de remplacer de coûteuses requêtes http pour des images. Sur la page des labs du projet Kompozer, j'ai combiné plusieurs de ces effets pour voir ce qu'on pourrait faire, notez par exemple le titre KompoZer Labs qui ne contient aucune image mais est une combinaison de dégradé, arrondis et d'ombrages sur une balise <h1>.

Pour ceux qui n'auraient pas un navigateur très récent, voici une capture d'écran montrant cette page dans les dernières versions de Firefox Trunk et Chromium sous Linux :

On peut noter que Chromium bien que supportant les dégradés CSS depuis plus longtemps que Mozilla a des bugs de rendus assez importants avec un très fort effet d'escalier dans le dégradé d'arrière-plan et beaucoup de mal avec les dégradés progressifs sur le h1, ça donne vraiment l'impression que le dégradé est calculé sur 256 couleurs seulement. Ça m'a un peu surpris car il me semblait que Webkit malgré un support imparfait des dégradés ferait mieux que gecko puisqu'ils avaient implémenté le draft CSS bien avant nous (ce qui explique leur syntaxe CSS assez compliquée pour le moment, elle a été simplifiée depuis et c'est ce que nous utilisons). En plus Paul me disait qu'il était sûr que sous Windows il n'y avait pas d'effet d'escalier sous Webkit,  j'ai donc lancé Virtualbox pour vérifier et voici la capture d'écran avec Safari 4, Chrome 3 et Firefox 3.6b5 :

Là on peut voir en fait que Webkit sait bien gérer les dégradés mais que c'est dans le fork Chrome de leur moteur de rendu qu'il y a un problème puisque Safari a un rendu correct. On notera aussi sur la capture de Chromium sous Ubuntu plus haut que le support des bords arrondis avec ombrage qui les suit devient enfin correct (il y a deux mois c'était pété de chez pété). Le rendu des polices avec ombrage diffère aussi entre Safari et Chrome, la version Safari est strictement identique à celle de Gecko alors que Chrome a un rendu trop léger à mon avis, on voit à peine les passages en gras.

À surveiller donc dans les mois à venir, ça pose la question du support correct des technologies dans les navigateurs, je me demande aussi comment se font les arbitrages dans le projet Webkit qui est maintenant bicéphale, le gros du développement du moteur de rendu étant assuré par Apple alors que Google a le gros des utilisateurs Webkit avec Chrome.

January 02, 2010 03:36 PM

I am not great at blogging in English and communicating about my work so I thought that publishing my yearly report would compensate that

All in all, it has been a busy year, nobody in the localization drivers team and among our localization teams had time to get bored, lots of product releases, lots of pages, lots of travel and events too. I am listing below what I have been directly leading and/or participating in, not some other projects where I was just giving a minor help (usually to my colleagues Stas and Delphine).

Products:

• 2 major releases: Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3 (with a new multilingual Mozilla Messaging website)
• 26 other releases (maintenance, beta and RC releases)

Mozilla Europe website(s):

• 3 new locales: Serbian, Bulgarian, Swedish, our geographic coverage of Europe is now almost complete
• New content for 3.5 release, minor releases and many side projects
• major cleanups of content and code for easier maintenance (especially maintenance releases) and more features (html5 support, per locale menu navigation, visits now with referrer hints for better locale detection...)
• Site now sharing same metrics application as other mozilla sites
• More per country news items than previous years (events, new community sites, community meetings...)
• 46 blog posts written by our European community on blogs.mozilla-europe.org
• Our events management web application was used for 10 European events (I created it back in summer 2008)

Mozilla.com website

• We now have a localized landing page for our 74 locales on top of up to date in-product pages
• Geolocation page for all locales
• 3.0 and 3.5 major updates offered for all locales
• Localized beta download pages to incitate beta-testing of non-English versions of Firefox
• Better code for our localized pages (better right-to-left, language switching, simpler templates...)
• Whatsnew/Firstun pages now warn the user in his language if his Flash plugin is outdated  (for better security and stability)
• Lots of content, css, graphics updates all along the year, everywhere
• Firefox 3.6 in-product pages (firstrun, whatsnew, major update) localization underway, pluginscheck page localization almost technically ready for localization
• Fennec pages being localized for 1.0 final

Marketing Sites made multilingual

• Fastest Firefox video campaign
• One Billion Plus You
• Mozilla Service Week
• Several updates to start pages snippets along the year
• Quarterly Firefox surveys for some locales on whatsnew pages

Mozilla Education:

• Gave a lecture at the Madrid university about opensource, the mozilla project and community management.
• MMTC Madrid one week sprint in July, gave Mozilla classes with Paul Rouget and Vivien Nicolas to 30 students (evaluation TBD)
• Organized CoMeTe project at Evry university, France,  in October with Fabien Cazenave and Laurent Jouanneau as teachers

Community work

• Found new localizers for a dozain locales, helped some creating blogs, community sites and local events
• Many community meetings, IRC or IRL
• Participated in Firefox 3.5 party in Madrid
• I am since May on twitter, communicating about my work and Mozilla in Europe
• Organized a theming contest in collaboration with the Dotclear project for our community blog, won by Marie Alhomme
• Created with Julia a Mozilla Planet for French Speakers
• Lots of Web l10n QA with Delphine plus some personal QA work on 3.6 looking for Linux specific Firefox bugs
• Went to 21 events (7 of them internal Mozilla events) like Fosdem, MozCamps Chile + Prague, Ubuntu parties, Solutions Linux, W3C event, Firefox 5 year anniversary, Firefox 3.5 party Madrid, JDLL, Geneva Community meetup... Lots of time abroad and travelling.
• Blogging in French about the Mozilla project and its place in the FLOSS ecosystem, current focus on Mozilla QA and how to get involved in the project.

Other

• Some documentation work (mostly on QA of localized pages)
• Many updates to the webdashboard
• Helped Delphine setting up Womoz website and general advices on community building
• Several press interviews for Spain as well as conferences given about the Mozilla project
• Started this week with Stas and Patrick the localization work needed for the Browser Choice Screen in Windows for Europe
• Lots of technical self teaching while building projects, I even did my first Jetpack extension this week, Yay!
• A new expresso machine

Happy new year 2010 to all mozillians and FOSS lovers in the world

January 02, 2010 04:36 AM

Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.

(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)

Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.

To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).

I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.

With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!

December 31, 2009 11:00 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 52/2009 (December 21 - 27, 2009):

• Websites:
  Had forgotten to upload 2.0 page when releasing 2.0.1 but corrected that now.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), Serbian L10n, external linkage for mailnews, etc.

Most of that week I spent at home relaxing, celebrating Christmas and playing some games with my parents. This week I'm starting a bit to come back, but celebrating the New Year will probably take away some more of my time. I hope everyone else is also refilling their batteries and coming back to full power in 2010!

December 31, 2009 12:32 AM

Voici les bogues (non liés à mon travail comme employé) que j'ai rapportés ce mois de décembre concernant les versions 3.6 bêta et 3.7 trunk de Firefox.

Bug 532721 - CSS Gradient backgrounds are not repainted when DOM is changed

J'ai trouvé celui là en testant l'un des tutoriels d'Alix de hacks.mozilla.org sur les CSS gradients, la page sur laquelle je travaillais était labs.kompozer.net qui me servait de terrain de test. Ce bogue a été accepté comme bloqueur et les développeurs se sont dépêchés pour qu'un patch soit intégré dans 3.6

Bug 531289 - Firefox doesn't obey system dpi settings anymore

J'ai trouvé ce bogue en testant les compils nocturnes du tronc, c'est une régression sous Gnome/Linux paradoxalement due à une tentative d'amélioration pour Firefox Mobile (Maemo, donc Linux). C'est le bogue typique qui n'est visible que si un grand nombre de testeurs avec des configurations différentes utilisent les compils nocturnes, dans ce cas précis, il fallait avoir réglé les polices de son bureau gnome en dessous de 96dpi pour le voir. Le patch coupable a été corrigé.

Bug 536631 - Firefox no longer detects rss feed

Personne ne s'était apperçu que depuis 3 mois, l'icône des flux RSS n'apparaissait plus dans les versions du tronc uniquement pour Linux. Un bogue similaire avait été rapporté par dbaron qui soupçonnait que cela pourrait poser problème aux applis xulrunner, ce bogue a donc été marqué comme "duplicate" de l'autre et le complète en augmentant son importance, pas encore réparé mais il est maintenantplus sur le radar des développeurs. Ce qui montre que personne n'utilise des versions Linux de Firefox trunk, nul doute qu'une régression aussi visible serait rapportée en quelques heures sous Windows ou Mac.

Bug 534767 - New Drag and Drop JS API does not work with Jetpack installed

J'ai découvert ce bogue en testant la démo de Paul File upload & Firefox 3.6, il s'agit d'une incompatibilité entre Jetpack et notre implémentation de la nouvelle API Drag N Drop d'HTML5, apparemment ça n'affecte que Linux (enfin, j'ai eu la flemme de tester sous Windows...). Il n'est pas clair encore si c'est Jetpack (qui en est en version 0.7 et est encore très vert) ou si c'est un bogue du côté de Firefox, mais a priori c'est un bogue Jetpack donc ça bloquerait pas la sortie de 3.6.

Bug 536843 - Flash plugin has display problems on Firefox Linux Trunk and 3.6 builds, regression

Une régression visuelle pour Flash qui m'énervait depuis 10 jours, bogue saisi il y a trois heures. Grâce au super script regression.py indiqué par Arnaud dans les commentaires de mon précédent billet sur le bêta-test j'ai pu rapidement identifier la date de régression, entre le 1er et le 2 octobre. J'ai trouvé cette régression depuis que j'ai remplacé ma 3.5.* par une 3.6beta 5 comme navigateur principal.

Quelles conclusions tirer de ces exemples ?

1. Il n'est pas nécessaire d'être extrèmement technique pour rapporter des bogues utiles, il ne faut pas penser que c'est réservé à des experts du contrôle qualité, ce n'est pas mon domaine de compétence même si ça m'intéresse
2. Des cinq bogues ci-dessus, quatre sont des bogues ne touchant que la plateforme Linux. On a vraiment besoin que les gens testent réellement les compils quotidiennes de Firefox et les utilisent sur les vrais sites, pas seulement pour tester combien elles font aux tests Sunspider et Acid3... C'est là l'énorme avantage que les versions Windows et Mac ont sur les versions Linux, des tas et des tas de testeurs. Même le nombre de testeurs mac doit être plus important d'un facteur 10 au moins (probablement plus) par rapport à la version Linux. Sans rêver de légions de linuxiens se mettant à la tâche, quelques bons testeurs additionnels et organisés sous Linux pourrait faire une énorme différence sur la qualité de Firefox sous notre OS.
3. Si vous êtes développeur web, il ne faut pas seulement tester ce que vous connaissez (mes sites marchent-ils dans le prochain Firefox ?) mais aussi les nouvelles technologies mises à notre disposition pour avoir une implémentation correcte de celles-ci lors de la sortie du navigateur et donc des nouveaux outils qui marchent tout de suite et pas dans un an après que les gros problèmes auront été réparés.
4. Le contrôle qualité communautaire est probablement un axe d'implication dans le logiciel libre trop méconnu car souvent associé uniquement aux contributeurs les plus techniques. Il y a là un potentiel de travail collaboratif communautaire important pour Mozilla et pour le libre en général. En fait, j'ai même l'impression que l'implication dans le 'bug triage' n'est pas aussi organisée qu'il y a quelques années, j'en suis un bon exemple, je ne suis redevenu réellement actif dans ce domaine que depuis novembre après plusieurs années de faibles activité alors que c'était une de mes activités les plus importantes quand je suis rentré dans le projet vers 2002.

December 27, 2009 05:57 AM

Les gens ont souvent une idée un peu abstraite de mozilla, de ce que l'on fait. Bien sûr il y a les grands concepts, le support des standards, le web ouvert et les événements, mais devant cet aspect public, il y a aussi du travail hyper concret et plein de gens qui poussent des wagonnets au fond de la mine pour faire avancer le projet et changer le web monde

Lorsque j'ai publié mon billet sur l'angle à donner à mon blog, Goofy et Cédric,  mes camarades de Frenchmozilla, m'ont suggéré de parler de ce que je fais, de mon travail, pour que les gens se rendent comptent de ce que c'est de travailler sur un projet comme Mozilla.

Déjà, vous aurez pu remarquer que je poste ce billet à une heure indécente, comme a l'habitude de dire mon collègue allemand Axel Hecht qui gère toute la localisation côté logiciel, "je vis au milieu de l'atlantique, dans un fuseau horaire flou".

Donc travailler dans mon domaine, c'est travailler à des horaires décalés car on sert d'intermédiaires entre des volontaires en majorité en Europe et contribuant le soir et des employés de Mozilla qui sont en Californie (ce qui me va très bien, j'ai toujours été un oiseau de nuit et déjà pendant mes études je travaillais la nuit comme traducteur freelance).

Aujourd'hui, voilà ce que j'ai fait :

• J'ai lancé Mozilla Europe en Suédois, tout ceci grâce à l'énorme travail de Markus Magnuson ces 6 derniers mois. C'est la dernière grande locale qui manquait au site, il faut savoir que la communauté mozilla suédoise se réduit à deux personnes, un seul étant impliqué dans la traduction (le traducteur de Firefox) et qu'il n'y a pas de réel site communautaire suédois. L'apport d'un site officiel est donc très important pour nous, il est sûrement imparfait car il n'a bénéficié d'aucune relecture mais au moins on l'a pour noël !!
• Ça ne concerne pas les francophones, mais j'ai livré aujourd'hui des nouveaux textes promotionnels pour la page Google en anglais (pour le reste du monde, ça sera pour fin Janvier).
• j'ai fait de la révision de patchs pour Alex Buchanan, mon collègue webdev qui me file un coup de main pour les pages Firefox Mobile, on espère pouvoir publier les pages en quelques langues en plus de l'anglais lors de la sortie de Firefox pour Mobile en RC ou final
• J'ai réparé la page Firefox US qui avait un bug (plus de pied de page)
• J'ai discuté sur des stratégies de gestion des fallback de langues avec plusieurs localiseurs qui veulent de la geoIP pour leurs locales plutôt que de la détection de langue (cas de l'Ukrainien ou Windows XP n'existe pas dans cette langue donc tout le monde utilise du Russe)
• J'ai réglé plusieurs problèmes administratifs (localiseur qui demande une modification de ses paramètres LDAP, prévision d'achat d'un portable compatible Linux pour Delphine, mise à jour de mon rapport d'activité pour mon chef...)
• J'ai commencé à préparer le travail pour la version 3.5.7 qui sortira dans deux semaines normalement
• J'ai validé une vingtaine de traductions fournies par notre communauté pour Firefox 3.6 et Thunderbird 3
• Participation  à une dizaine de listes de diffusion et à quelques forums mozilla sur des sujets divers et variés (assistance utilisateur, bêta-test, gestion de conflit dans une communauté...)
• J'ai trollé un peu mais pas trop sur le canal IRC francophone 

Voilà, une journée typique d'employé Mozilla, demain (tout à l'heure en fait) on recommence 

December 23, 2009 04:08 AM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 51/2009 (December 14 - 20, 2009):

• Releases:
  Released SeaMonkey 2.0.1, updating security and stability compared to 2.0 final, as well as fixing a number of other glitches found in the previous final release.
  As a side note, we know that caused lots of users to experience automated update the first time ever and leaves a number of them more or less excited!
• Build Machines:
  My patches for the buildbotcustom breakage and the checkout timeouts got reviews and were checked in.
  I also could get reviews for freezing branch extensions so that we don't inadvertently take string changes on the branch any more, which I checked in together with pulling ChatZilla from Mercurial on the branch.
  This made us not need local patching on the buildmaster any more, we're now finally running an unpatched tip of buildbotcustom there.
  After clobbering the dist/ directory on build machines, we saw some Windows failures that could be resolved with a full objdir clobber.
  At the weekend, we had problems with a build machine that only Mozilla System Operations could fix, I filed a bug for that.
• Metrics and Bug Radars:
  I worked myself through some numbers on the release bug radars that should not be, like any unfixed blocking bugs or requests on shipped releases, or similar things with approvals, or bugs targeted at shipped milestones. I could clear out most of those, or request them to be cleared, and one is a blocker that got reopened.
  I also did some work on improving how we receive data about daily downloads and active users from the Mozilla metrics team and how we store them and create reports. I got some preliminary views of the data done, but need to do more work on all this before making those reports fully accessible to the public.
  For now, I can tell you that we have almost 500,000 manually triggered downloads of SeaMonkey 2.0 (significantly more than any other version in 2009), peaking at almost 30,000 per day on October 28, and 1.1.x downloads dropping to <4% of the daily total since that day. Active Daily Users ("ADU") on 2.x have risen to over 50,000 as of December 12th (which is the last day we currently have data from), over 97% of those on stable releases, 550-650 on nightlies (150-200 of those on 2.1a1pre).
  More data will come in the following weeks, once I come around to work on the presentation a bit more.
• Various Discussions:
  Windows 2.0.1 freeze when entering addresses (related to OE contacts), Lightning beta nearing, interview for article on Asa's non-Google recommendation, 1.9.1.7 fast-cycle release, Serbian L10n, continued SeaMonkey 2.0 feedback and support group bashing, add-on support and compatibility and ways of improving that, Mozilla domain names (.com/.org), possible changes in Mozilla roadmap, Manifesto and privacy, etc.

It's good to be back into doing actual work after the vacation, but I also noticed that Christmas neared way faster than expected during working backlog and trying to stay relaxed - I've not even drunk any cup of Punch this winter even though our Christmas markets are so famous for all kinds of variations of that stuff (as well as "Glühwein" and "Glühmost", which are wine- or cider-based hot drinks). At least I could complete my collection of presents today...

With that, I wish y'all who celebrate it a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays if you have some, and all others a good time this week - I'll mostly step back from work and spend some time with my parents, grandparents, brother and probably his future wife, possibly also some friends of the family.

December 22, 2009 07:30 PM

J'ai bossé ce week end sur le nouveau planète francophone, en bloguant à ce sujet il y a deux jours je me suis dit que ce serait bien de refaire le thème car notre ancien thème datait (capture de l'ancien thème).

Le nouveau thème est proche visuellement du planet anglophone, même s'il ne partage pas de code ni d'images avec lui. Il fait plus sérieux et il y a beaucoup plus d'espace pour la lecture par rapport à l'ancienne version.

J'ai dû abandonner l'utilisation de polices web pour le texte principal, je n'ai pas réussi à en trouver une qui sous Windows soit lisible, gère les gras et les italiques et respecte les hauteurs de lettres (sous Linux tout va bien, merci). C'est dommage, il y a énormément de polices disponibles mais probablement que très peu sont compatibles entre les OS et encore moins ont une licence libre permettant de les utiliser sur le Web. Je pense qu'il serait intéressant de recenser les polices libres réellement compatibles toutes plateformes et navigateurs (modernes) pour faciliter la tâche. J'ai tout de même conservé une police téléchargeable un peu originale pour les titres de section.

Ça faisait longtemps que je n'avais pas fait un design de zéro, donc c'était assez sympa de s'y remettre, ça m'a permis de jouer avec du CSS3, je suis content de mes séparateurs d'articles d'ailleurs:

div.article:after {
  content:"";
  width:80%;
  display:block;
  margin:auto;
  margin-top:30px;
  -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 2px 1px #ADC0CF;
}

Si vous voulez être agrégé sur le planète mozilla francophone, vous pouvez contacter Julia (julia À buchner POINT fr) et lui transmettre l'adresse de votre flux rss/atom. Votre flux doit parler de Mozilla, sa communauté, ses technos... , pour cela le plus simple c'est de créer une étiquette mozfr pour votre flux. Pour dotclear un flux web sur une étiquette a ce format:

http://www.chevrel.org/fr/carnet/index.php?feed/tag/mozfr/atom.

On en est à 20 flux de la communauté francophone Mozilla sur le planète, ça commence à être pas mal.

December 20, 2009 04:38 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 50/2009 (December 7 - 13, 2009):

• Releases:
  continued preparing SeaMonkey 2.0.1, an update of security and stability compared to 2.0 final, as well as of a number of other glitches found in the previous final release.
• Build Machines:
  Updated the buildbot environment on our master and all slaves to be current code again after 2.0.1 felt safe to not need more build work. This needed some downtime and tree closure, but it led to having our re-imaged Mac mini join the pool and give us some of the much-needed additional build power on the slowest-to-build platform.
  I found one new bug in buildbotcustom for which I had to find and manually apply a patch for the moment, and I filed a bug for the timeout issue for which I had manually applied a patch for some time already. With that, and a better solution for the branch extensions issue, I could make us be on target again to run an unpatched tip of buildbotcustom - for the moment, I needed the three patches applied manually though.
  I finally did/proposed the newer, better patch for the latter issue later in the same week as well.
• Mozilla Website Tools:
  On the way to a SeaMonkey 2.0.1 release, I realized was pointed to the fact that I should be able to add version info to the crash-stats site myself, and filed a bug to get access.
  When I finally updated my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes to 2.0 versions on AMO, I realized that there's a bogus L10n check for themes on add-on upload and filed that.
• Testday:
  The Mozilla people held a SeaMonkey 2.0 Testday on Friday, which I participated in with supporting people and asking for a few test tasks. When I got confirmed in the beginning of that day that updates from 2.0 to 2.0.1 didn't work on the "beta" channel, I looked for the reason, finally found the error on the update server and corrected it. Then we got that version smoketested, some litmus test descriptions corrected (thanks to Serge, who is now leading QA efforts), and some bugs filed, esp. on how to further improve our suite.
  Overall, a very successful day, with tonymec, Milos, and ashuges doing some good testing and bug filing, and ashuges teaming up with aakash to lead the testday - thanks to all those and Serge for making this a successful event!
• Various Discussions:
  Thunderbird 3.0 release, 1.9.1.6 security advisories, Lightning support, etc.

I won't give much additional comment to that week, some good stuff happened and I could shorten my backlogs from vacation and get to some actual new work - but I somehow didn't come around to post this update about last week for almost the whole of this week, so I'll leave it stand as it is - and hope the next update for the actual current week will come around faster

December 19, 2009 11:43 PM

(I know I'm very late for a Weekly Status Update, I still need to write up the one for last week, hope to come to it soon.)

I wanted to write this post on the day of the actual anniversary, but I got caught in a few other things... In any case, On December 17th, 1999, which happens to be just two days more than 10 years today, I wrote a small, innocent newsgroup message:

And I got an instant reply from the back-then L10n coordinator at Netscape/Mozilla, containing among other things those two sentences:


That was "fatal" in the sense that it pointed to my fate in the upcoming years. What has started with trying what that technology could do was turning into a major mission.
In the hours or days before, I had (out of interest what new things would come out of my beloved Netscape side of the "browser wars") downloaded a new milestone version of this "Mozilla" development software, whose downloadable test binaries were provided under the "project Seamonkey". I was intrigued by the open philosophy but also the technology, as it looked like I would understand those UI files in the "chrome" directory, and they were even easier than the Visual Basic stuff I knew! Among other things like playing with the CSS and what I could screw there (birth of the LCARStrek theme), I tried if replacing the strings in those *.dtd files would really have an influence on the screen by putting German words instead of English ones in there - and it worked! I tried a few more things, read up on all kinds of info about this L10n effort with DTD files, and decided I could help this open-minded project by contributing to the German localization.
And after that reply from Tao, I was suddenly leading the German efforts (note that he's talking of "THE German translation contributor") and saw myself in the mission of providing a full translation of that early development piece of software.

10 years later, I can't believe how long it's been, where it has led to and what a fun ride it turned out to be. I've seen lots of things here with Mozilla in those years, I've got to know a huge number of very bright and incredibly cool people in all parts of the project, and I lived with it through seeing Netscape slowly go down, being an enthusiastic player on the sidelines of the game the Internet world played, up to the rise of Firefox, its incredible success, contributing to the installation of a new Mozilla Foundation Executive Director, and the funding and stabilization of the SeaMonkey project, and I hope I'll still have many more years to be with that project, do something for the greater world and our community, leave my footprints here and there, and above all, have fun working with all those cool people we have in the Mozilla community.

I would have never imagined that this small newsgroup message would change my life in such a large way, but 10 years later I couldn't be happier about actually having taken that step and get this ball rolling by offering my help.

I encourage everyone to not think twice in similar situations and try to help a cool project like Mozilla if they have the chance to - the rewards are much higher than the effort you invest in it!

December 19, 2009 05:54 PM

Sonny me faisait remarquer hier lors de notre soirée bières entre mozilliens que personne ne sait qu'il existe un planet francophone pour Mozilla maintenu par la communauté.

Ce planète agrège les billets sur l'actualité Mozilla de tous les blogueurs participant au projet, faites passez le lien!

http://planete.mozfr.org/

December 19, 2009 05:06 PM

Lorsqu'on teste les "noctures", ces compilations quotidiennes de Firefox incorporant les patchs du jour, on peut trouver des bugs et vouloir les rapporter aux développeurs dans Bugzilla.

Une chose qui aide les développeurs est de savoir à peu près quand la régression (le nouveau comportement anormal) est apparu, pour savoir quels patchs ont été intégrés entre ces deux versions, c'est ce qu'on appelle la fenêtre de régression.

Pour cela, il faut télécharger une ancienne version des nocturnes et voir si le bug y est toujours, si oui, on recommence avec une version plus ancienne (de la veille, de la semaine dernière...)

Une fois qu'on a trouvé une compil qui n'a pas le bug, on remplit son bug sur bugzilla en indiquant:

1/ l'identifiant de build complet de la version qui ne marche pas, par exemple:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091218 Minefield/3.7a1pre

vous trouverez cette information à copier-coller dans le menu aide/à propos de (menu ? sous Windows)

2/ Le lien vers les révisions du code source compilé, vous le trouverez en tapant about:buildconfig dans la barre d'adresse de Firefox qui affichera une page commençant par:

about:buildconfig

Source

Built from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/a31ccbb61076

Votre commentaire peut donc ressembler à ça:

No bug in 20091125 build:

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/d76583175408

Bug is visible in 20091126 build:

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/77136b3d68fc

Grâce à ces informations, les développeurs et le contrôle qualité peut savoir quels patchs ont été intégrés entre ces deux dates grâce à un outil en ligne:

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=d76583175408&tochange=77136b3d68fc

Ces étapes simples réduisent considérablement le travail des développeurs. C'est aussi pour ça qu'il est utile de rapporter les régressions rapidement et de tester les nocturnes, surtout sous Linux où nous avons très peu de testeurs volontaires (moins de 1% de nos bêta-testeurs) par rapport aux bêta testeurs sous Windows ou Mac.

Bons tests!!

December 19, 2009 04:46 PM

Un petit détail sous linux, l'icône de loupe du champ de recherche de Firefox sera à l'avenir une icône système (si on change de thème gnome, l'icône changera).

Avant dans Firefox 3.6:

Après dans le futur Firefox 3.7 (avec le thème Human d'Ubuntu):

December 19, 2009 03:54 PM

Bêta-testez
Firefox 3.7
en VF

C'est assez peu connu mais tous les jours Mozilla compile Firefox dans toutes ses langues, tous les OS supportées et dans toutes les versions.

Ça veut dire que vous pouvez installer un Firefox 3.7a1pre en français qui bénéficie d'une mise à jour automatique quotidienne.

Voici où vous trouverez les binaires:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-l10n/

Pour la VF c'est :

• Linux: firefox-3.7a1pre.fr.linux-i686.tar.bz2
• Mac: firefox-3.7a1pre.fr.mac.dmg
• Windows: firefox-3.7a1pre.fr.win32.installer.exe

Vous êtes donc parés pour faire du bêta-test des futures versions de Firefox et découvrir les nouveautés au fur et à mesure de leur implémentation (par exemple cette semaine, les premiers pas du multiprocessing avec les plugins dans un processus séparé).

Évidemment, il est conseillé d'utiliser un profil de données à part pour ça, sauf si vous aimez vivre dangereusement :).

December 18, 2009 05:05 PM

Par curisosité, j'ai installé  sur ma machine toutes les versions de Firefox depuis sa création et je leur ai fait passer le test Sunspider (de l'équipe Webkit), voici les résultats:

Firefox, test Sunspider à travers le temps
1.0	1.5	2.0	3.0	3.5	3.6b5	trunk
13.394	12.721	12.385	3.173	1.432	1.170	979

Plus le chiffre est petit, mieux c'est. Sous Linux Opera 10.10 est à 5.000 et Chrome/Chromium en nightly est premier avec 500ms, pas d'IE chez moi puisque je suis sous Linux mais ils sont très très loin derrière tout le monde (genre un facteur 20) d'après ce que j'ai pu lire sur d'autres sites.

Et un joli graphique pour illustrer :


Nous ne sommes donc pas les premiers sur ce test mais nous sommes très loin d'être ridicules ! Il est utile de rappeler que nous continuons de progresser régulièrement et énormément sur les perfs javascript et que ces améliorations profitent aussi à la version Linux (de toutes façons, on est vendredi, j'ai le droit de troller ). D'ailleurs, c'est bien grâce aux améliorations énorme de notre moteur que les démos de Paul sont maintenant possibles!

Un petit rappel si vous utilisez Firebug, votre moteur de compilation JIT de javascript est désactivé et vous aurez donc des perfs équivalentes à celles de Firefox 3.0, même si vous êtes en 3.5. La version 1.5beta7 de Firebug sortie hier devrait résoudre ce bug.

December 18, 2009 03:07 PM

This morning the Mozilla community released Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, making it available for free download and issuing an automatic update to all Firefox 3.6 beta users. This update contains over 100 fixes from the last Firefox 3.6 beta, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. Over 70% 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:

• Support for the HTML5 File API
• A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• 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 of Firefox 3.6 see this list (it’s big).

If you already have Firefox 3.6 Beta, you should be automatically updated to the latest version in the next 24 to 48 hours. You can also choose to manually “Check for Updates” from the Help menu.

If you’d like to download Firefox 3.6 Beta, please use the following links or visit the beta download page:

• Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 5.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b5.tar.bz2

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

December 17, 2009 11:10 PM

As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.6 and Firefox 3.0.16 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.6 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.16 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 3.5.6 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.16 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3.0.x users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.6 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

December 16, 2009 06:28 AM

Il fut une époque où j'étais un gros blogueur, plusieurs billets par jour sur l'actu Mozilla et le web ouvert. Aujourd'hui lorsque je dépasse les deux billets par mois, je sors presque le champagne !!

Quelles sont les raisons à cela ? J'en vois plusieurs :

• J'ai beaucoup moins de temps pour bloguer, mon travail pour Mozilla me prenant tout mon temps
• Je me suis rabattu sur Twitter qui nécessite un investissement en temps bien plus court, tant au niveau de l'écriture des micro-billets que de la communication avec ceux qui me suivent grâce en partie à l'utilisation d'un client Twitter efficace (Echofon, extension Firefox)
• Plusieurs blogueurs francophones commentent l'actu mozilla et le font avec talent, ma valeur ajoutée informative devient donc marginale
• J'ai via Twitter un lectorat de technophiles identifié, environ 250 personnes, je ne suis pas sûr d'avoir toujours un lectorat concret sur ce blog.
• Moins je blogue, plus il m'est difficile d'écrire des billets. Le blog est finalement un certain exercice de style facilité par une pratique régulière

Est-ce que cela signifie que je vais arrêter de bloguer ici? Rassurez-vous rares lecteurs, non !

Déjà, ce n'est pas visible publiquement mais j'utilise en fait beaucoup ce blog pour des billets privés partagés avec des collègues de travail (rapports d'activité essentiellement) et occasionnellement je blogue en anglais lorsque je veux faire passer une info sur planet.mozilla.org.

Ensuite, j'ai envie de parler sur ce blog de l'actu mozilla sous des angles différents, peut être plus communautaire, l'envie est donc toujours là mais le temps malheureusement me manque. Je réfléchis donc à quels types de billets francophones non-chronophages je pourrais poster ici.

Quelques idées:

• Je pourrais publier des résumés de mes rapports d'activité mensuels, mais y a t'il un intérêt à publier ce type d'informations en français ? Je le fais déjà pas en anglais, je laisse mon chef ajouter ça à notre rapport d'équipe hebdomadaire
• des en-vrac mensuels de ce que je raconte d'intéressant sur Twitter, j'ai un copain qui fait ça genre "mes meilleurs infos du mois sur Twitter"
• J'aimerais que ce blog puisse servir de plateforme de communication pour construire une plus grande communauté Mozilla francophone, en particulier dans des domaines où on pourrait progresser (QA, l10n, communication inter-projets, bêta-test, vidéos, tutoriels...). Mais j'ai peur que ça me prenne trop de temps en fait.
• Je publie des photos de chatons ?

D'autres suggestions ?

December 15, 2009 06:54 PM

December 13, 2009 09:22 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 49/2009 (November 30 - December 6, 2009):

• Releases:
  Freshly being back from vacation, I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.1 this week. This is mostly a security and stability update to the 2.0 release, but also fixes a number of other glitches in that release.
  The branch nightlies now report as SeaMonkey 2.0.2pre.
• Build Machines:
  I updated the SeaMonkey build configuration for a change in how test results are reported. That made browser-chrome tests be reported to the tinderbox view correctly again.
  I filed a bug for further updating the configuration to be on top of current code again, but I wanted to have 2.0.1 out of the way for that, as I expect some redness and possibly also some work I need to do on the release configurations. Probably I will look into this on the upcoming weekend if it looks good that we can release 2.0.1 as it is right now.
  Those further updates will also be needed to fully get the re-imaged mini into the build/test pool after I got everything else finished up on that machine in this last week.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  For 2.0.1, we can add Italian as a new available language.
  Japanese is almost ready, but still fails to build correctly due to ChatZilla string differences.
  The first build of 2.0.1 had issues as Spanish (Spain) had ChatZilla string changes that we can't take in 2.0.x and failed to build. Due to the swift reaction of Ricardo, our localizer for that language, we has a very good turnaround time to be able to do a second build where all locales built correctly.
• Various Discussions:
  SeaMonkey 2.0 feedback - download manager, form management and other things, upcoming SeaMonkey test day, Thunderbird 3.0 getting ready for release, code signing, extension updates and 2.0.x series, commit access policy, etc.

I spent a lot of time this week working the backlogs of bugmails, normal emails (not counting anything related to support, those always get treated as low priority here), and newsgroups, as well as skimming over planet entries from the three weeks when I was gone, but I also could get started on some good work items. I'm approaching most things a bit more relaxed right now though, and I'll try to continue that habit.

Oh, and as a sidenote, the 2.0 versions of my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes are now online on the SeaMonkey add-ons website as well as on my personal themes page.

December 10, 2009 01:53 AM

Mozilla Messaging is happy to announce that Thunderbird 3 is now available for download.  Thunderbird 3 has been under development for the past two years, and contains many new features we’re excited about and we think users will enjoy.

Some of the new features:

• Thunderbird 3 is available in 49 languages – get your local version.
• Tabbed Email.
• The new search experience is much faster, and new search tools will help you narrow down your search.
• A new Message Archive folder system will help you organize your email.
• Lots of user experience improvements: main toolbar has been simplified, new search widget, new Mail Account Wizard, Smart Folders, Activity Manager, one-click Address Book, Attachment Reminder.

As always Thunderbird 3 is available as a free download.

We encourage developers to read the Thunderbird 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

December 08, 2009 08:09 PM

If you're interested in how we're making Firefox start faster, follow Dietrich Ayala's weekly posts on performance.

December 05, 2009 01:56 AM

December 05, 2009 01:43 AM

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate 2 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, stability, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.0 (Release Candidate 2) is now available for download, containing fixes based on the feedback obtained from the previous release candidate.

New features in Thunderbird 3 that require feedback include:

• New Search Tools
• Tabbed Email
• Message Archiving
• New Mail Account Setup Wizard
• Improvements for Developers

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate 2 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 49 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.0 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

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

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

December 02, 2009 07:49 AM

Nous sommes à la recherche de volontaires supplémentaires pour maintenir Firefox en langue occitane.

Actuellement nous avons une version officielle de Firefox 3.5 en occitan, mais l'état actuel de la traduction (tant au niveau du logiciel que des pages web associées) ne permet pas d'affirmer qu'on fera une version 3.6 et s'agissant d'une langue rare, les volontaires ne sont pas légion

Si vous maîtrisez l'occitan et voulez aider à maintenir Firefox dans cette langue, vous pouvez m'envoyer un message (pascal À mozilla.com) ou bien laisser un commentaire ici.

Nous avons actuellement un traducteur, l'idée serait d'en avoir un deuxième voire un troisième, pour que si le traducteur principal n'est pas disponible à l'approche d'une nouvelle version, un de ses pairs puissent le remplacer.

N'hésitez-pas à faire passer le message autour de vous!!!

Merci !

December 01, 2009 05:38 PM

This morning the Mozilla community released Firefox 3.6 Beta 4, making it available for free download and issuing an update for all Firefox 3.6 beta users. This update contains over 100 fixes from the last Firefox 3.6 beta, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. Almost 70% 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 version) Support for the HTML5 File API
• A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• 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 of Firefox 3.6 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 4 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 4.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b4.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 26, 2009 02:51 PM

Please note: the Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release candidate.

The Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on providing a preview of the functionality provided by the new features and changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.0.

New features in Thunderbird 3 that require feedback include:

• New Search Tools
• Tabbed Email
• Message Archiving
• New Mail Account Setup Wizard
• Improvements for Developers

Testers can download Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 49 different languages. Developers should also read the Thunderbird 3.0 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Thunderbird 3.0 Release Candidate milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

November 24, 2009 09:56 PM

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 Morgamic’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 team is providing.

Below are two images of a sample two page report.

and

ShareThis

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.

The amount of posts in the SeaMonkey support newsgroup is almost mindboggling right now, and thanks to the team (thank you for supporting us!) are mixing with migration problem from 1.x, unclarities about changed feature sets, as well as other questions and problems.
The step from 1.x to 2.0 is rather large, we know that, and migration is something people don't test repeatedly, so it was clear we would run into a certain amount of problems there, that's just unavoidable. I'm pretty happy with the low amount of real bugs that have popped up so far, though I'd be happy if I would have the time to prepare an update parallel to the crash-fix Firefox 3.5.5 release that's upcoming late this or early next week - unfortunately, the slowness of our build machines, some time needed for community QA, and my vacation starting Saturday leaves too little time to do such a cycle in time and we'll need to wait with fixing those somewhat higher-profile crashes only in December in a 2.0.1 update.
I hope our users can do with what we have in 2.0 until then - and of course, we'll work on improving this product even further, with 2.0.* stability and security updates as well as a 2.1 development cycle and release next year.

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

Une version très mature donc, très léchée, avec un focus évident pour l'amélioration de l'ergonomie et de l'esthétique du système, on sent que le projet papercut a porté ses fruits. Pour l'instant je suis content

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.

This status update is late once again, but somehow I had other things in mind in those last two days.

And I'm not sure I have fully realized yet that we managed to do that release we've been working on for almost 4 years - but it's great that we actually made that step and I can't tell enough how proud I am of everyone who helped that to come true - everyone one of those contributors and those fixing bugs in the 2.0 cycle are only one part of the people behind this release. In addition to the developers, all localizers, everyone doing QA, testing nightlies, and prereleases, filing bugs or otherwise helping the project, including the users - all those people in our community have been helping to build this release. I might be coordinating the project but it's all of you who make it a success, so congratulations to everyone in our community, you have done a really great job and made things possible that nobody would have believed when we started this project in 2005.
Well done, thanks for everything, and I'm looking forward to continuing this for improving the suite even further!

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.

I hope that finally our builds for SeaMonkey 2.0 are done - we'll see how well RC 2 holds up in testing this week, but chances are good that next Tuesday will be the big day and we can go gold, just converting those exact build to the final ones. A tremendous development effort from all around our team went into this release in the 3½ years we've now been working on it, and the What's New list in the release notes only shows the tip of the iceberg. This is the first really major release from our project after we've been releasing fixed-up, slightly improved and rebranded version of the old Mozilla suite for quite some time.
This time we ship a new suite, a modern reincarnation of the original idea, and completely done by the volunteer team of the SeaMonkey project. Thanks to everyone who helped us to come so far, every one of those people in our community can be proud of him/herself these days.

Now let's test the hell out of it this week and then actually release it - are you with me?

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.

I'm sorry my status updates are not coming as early as they should come, I had a few things to do this weekend including Monday, e.g. moving the SeaMonkey 1.x tinderboxes to a new location - and trying to recover from a cold.

In any case, things look very good when looking at RC1 feedback, no major issues reported, a few more smaller bugs have been fixed though - we are at 154 fixed-seamonkey2.0 bugs now, which is a very impressive number since the second beta and which also includes a number of fixes since RC1 already. We currently have no reported blockers and no requests for blocking, so we look to be ready to go for a RC2 which is as much ready to be the final 2.0 as we know yet (we're just waiting for a "go" on a new build of the 1.9.1.4 platform right now). Of course, only good testing will show if it can hold up and really go golden roughly a week after it's being published to testers as an RC.

Let's hope that nothing bad comes up and it can step in front of the curtain as the real thing later this month!

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.

Sorry this update is late once again, but I was somewhat busy getting all the L10n opt-ins etc. ready for starting 2.0 RC1 builds, which should be in progress now, hopefully we can push them public quite soon after some preliminary testing, so we get broader testing on the builds before we do a final release.

So, once we have those builds, please help testing!

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.

I gave an interview this week with Mozilla Hispano, the English version of which has been posted to Mozilla Links.

And this weekend I'll be at EU MozCamp 2009 in Prague and hope to meet a few of you there - and show off SeaMonkey 2.0 there!

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