Hacking for Christ

Knowing when the various languages were available would be helpful. IE might, for example, eventually get to a point where they ship in more languages than Firefox, but that's not the case at launch.

Mike: Yes, sorry, you made this point last time and I neglected to mention something about it. It's clear that the IE versions appear over a period of about four months after release, which puts our simul-ship fantasticness into perspective. But I can't find hard release dates for the various versions, so it's hard to turn that into something visible. And I'm not sure how I can roll it into the spreadsheet. On the one hand, it sucks to be later. On the other hand, there's a bunch of languages they do that we don't, and better a bit later than not at all. So it seems hard to ding them for it.

If you could find hard data, you could put the dates from one browser all in one column, and you’d have the next column find the earliest release date in the previous column and then calculate the number of days elapsed since then for each localization. Then you could take your analysis from there.

Once upon a time I could have given you the single formula to do that sort of thing, but it should still be easy enough to just have a min-value sitting at the bottom of each release date column and then have each cell in the next column (days elapsed) reference the min-value absolutely when doing the math.

In your "Which language communities do we serve which IE does not?" FAQ, "Vietnamese" should probably be "Venda".

Benoit: Good catch, fixed.