Hacking for Christ: Comment on Firefox 3 Language Coverage

Comments: Firefox 3 Language Coverage

FF3 freezes when I click on the snapshot link...
Mandriva 2008.1

Posted by Paul at June 12, 2008 4:15 PM

Gerv, they're not "language packs". We have full releases in all of those languages. Language packs are something you bolt on to a non-native release of Firefox.

A lot of work goes in to the integration that makes a full language release and calling them "language packs" will make people think you're discounting those efforts.

- A

Posted by Asa Dotzler at June 12, 2008 4:19 PM

Asa: it's just loose language, no more than that. I didn't mean to discount anyone. To be honest, I thought I'd get flak for combining the Portugueses and the Spanishes :-)

The question I was trying to answer was "can someone get the Firefox (or IE) UI in their language", regardless of the mechanism. So I lumped packs, addons, full builds, IE's MUI Packs and Language Interface packs all together in one, and called them "language packs". If there's a better description which covers all these things, tell me and I'll use it.

Paul: Works for me...

Posted by Gerv at June 12, 2008 9:43 PM

Hmm. Perhaps "localizations" would do. Let's try that.

Posted by Gerv at June 12, 2008 9:49 PM

I answered yesterday to the post you put in the l10n group about this study.

Posted by pascalc at June 12, 2008 11:17 PM

What does the curve look like in terms of time to market? How long does it take for IE to get to their %age of coverage, vs. FF or other browsers?

Posted by shaver at June 13, 2008 1:13 AM

I know it doesn’t count, but Firefox did have a Vietnamese language pack, but it was pulled. A sanitized version has been uploaded to Bugzilla, but not approved yet as an extension.

Posted by Minh Nguyễn at June 13, 2008 4:24 AM

Opera 9.5 has just been released in 30 languages; they are at 84.8%.

shaver: You mean, how long after release, as opposed to our simultaneous release? According to the IE blogpost, it takes them 2-3 weeks to do Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, and up to four months for the rest. They don't give exact dates for each - if I could find files with valid dates on them, I could plot a curve.

Minh: You mean uploaded to addons.mozilla.org? It's a shame approval is taking so long. I wonder if that's a manpower thing. Perhaps now that we're code complete, some other people will be able to help.

Posted by Gerv at June 13, 2008 7:57 AM

Oops, sorry, 84.25%. I misread their download table. They don't have the latest version in Afrikaans or Punjabi yet.

Posted by Gerv at June 13, 2008 8:02 AM

It would have been interesting if F3 Download Day's stats had been available by language, not just by country.

Posted by Luistxo at June 19, 2008 6:45 AM