firefox 3.0.2 security and stability update
Today we shipped the Firefox 3.0.2 update for Firefox users on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Most of you are uses to these regular security and stability updates but there's an all too often uncelebrated minor update tory that really deserves some attention this time around: localizations.
With today's release, we've now got official releases for Sinhala and Slovene as well as beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telegu, and Thai available for testing. That's 8 new locales coming online for Firefox 3, bringing the total up to 57!!
Mozilla's amazing localization community pushes really hard to get localizations ready for major releases like Firefox 3, but not all of them make it. Our minor updates are a chance to get some that we couldn't squeeze into the major releases and to introduce new "beta" locale versions.
Seth, and everyone involved, have really taken it up a notch with how much they've accomplished and how much progress we're making to ensure that everyone the world over can use Firefox in their preferred language.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
There comes a question: What does Mozilla do to motivate localizers and ease their pain? I think nothing. Even small projects like Shiira has very easy tools, but Mozilla localizers have to face different learning curves to adopt themselves to new tools. Creating XPI, Mozilla Translator, CVS, Mercurial, etc. And just saying thanks to those who fight with deadlines and these tools isn't enough.
Posted by: Ben | September 24, 2008 3:48 AM
Ben, and that's not all we do. Seth is going to be vocal about what we do on his blog, and I promised him a post myself.
There's stuff that's just not magically going to disappear, like xpis. Or tools tailored to Mozilla l10n. Or different localization schemes for different piece. But we're going to make things easier for sure.
Mozilla is and will remain torn between a product that's blasting award shows and raises expectations on open source software to unknown heights, a good deal of localization teams that make us localize anything in that ecosystem, and small 1 person teams of small languages.
We're not going to get the right solution for everybody, but we're trying to get some level of "OK" with some variety on our expectations on localization teams.
Posted by: Axel Hecht | September 24, 2008 11:53 AM
Just curious: why is there no Gujarati OS X version?
Posted by: j. | September 24, 2008 4:55 PM
Layout problems on Gujarati with the mac font system.
Posted by: Axel Hecht | September 26, 2008 9:26 AM
Asa, I would be interested in a post as to why Mozilla is not aggressively auto upgrading people from 1.5 and 2.0 to 3.0?
The web is held back by Firefox 1.5 and 2.0.
Posted by: Gregor J. Rothfuss | September 27, 2008 4:45 PM