Eight new locales shipping in Firefox 3.0.2

I’ve been mentioning this a lot during Mozilla Weekly Meetings, but with the upcoming release of Firefox 3, we will be shipping eight new locales as “beta” version.  Eight!  That’s a big number and I’ll explain why below.  But first, if you’re wondering what “beta” means, it’s simply a distinction we give to locales that are very close to being fully localized, but will be tweaked a bit in future minor updates.

Pike resolved bug 450655 which updates shipped-locales for the new beta versions that will be going out in Firefox 3.0.2.  We will be adding the following (I’ve linked to Wikipedia descriptions of each language if you are unfamiliar):

• Bengali (bn-IN)
• Hindi (hi-IN)
• Kannada (kn)
• Marathi (mr)
• Telugu (te)
• Galician (gl)
• Icelandic (is)
• Thai (th)

I visited Wikipedia page to find the low-end number of people in the world who speak these languages.  By adding these eight locales, over 1.2 billion people who might one day access the Web can do so through a localized version of Firefox. Staggering!!

Of course, it’s not fair to use this metric because a much smaller percentage of that great number has access to the Internet.  Luckily, Gerv constructed a model that he blogged about some weeks back that I found helpful in determining percentage of the Internet population covered by Firefox 3.  We can now see the impact of adding new languages to Firefox 3 through Gerv’s model.  Thanks, Gerv.  With the addition of these localizations, Firefox 3’s coverage of the Internet population grew from 88.64% to 93.10%. That is also an amazing jump!

(As I mentioned above, this is based on a rough model constructed by Gerv that we presented at the Mozilla Summit.  We make a lot of assumptions and the data is incomplete, but Gerv has explained his methodolgy in his post.  I’m looking to improve this model going forward so we can be even more accurate.  It’s close, but not perfect.  Ping me if you’re interestd in helping.)

Regardless of the numbers, this was a heroic effort by the community of localizers and by the l10n-drivers team.  You’ll find me passing out congratulations when it’s deserved, so I would like to acknowlege the following people for this effort:

L10n-drivers team:

• Axel Hecht (Pike on IRC) — he probably won’t tell you, but he didn’t sleep much at all over the past couple weeks, working very hard to make this happen.  Amazing work by Pike.
• Mic Berman — Steadily guided localizers through the Web services components of these browsers
• Pascal Chevrel — Great work on managing the web parts of the localization process
• Wil Clouser — Always helping with web dev and clarifying bugs when possible
• Chris Hofmann — Answer questions, keeping up enthusiasm, and developing the community of localizers
• Tim Riley and the QA team — Testing away to perfection…

Localizers “and team”:

• Bengali:  Runa B and the team
• Hindi:  Rajesh and team
• Kannada:  Shankar and team
• Marathi:  Sandeep and gang
• Telugu:  Krishna and the team
• Galician:  Javier et al.
• Icelandic:  Kristján and team
• Thai:  Isriya, Patipat, Arthit and everyone

It’s probably goes without saying, but for me, it’s hard to describe the amount of work and coordination that goes into this process.  Everyone has put in such a great effort to make this happen.  If you’re out having a pint of your beverage of choice, please offer a toast to these people because they deserve it.  Congrats to everyone!

Tags: l10n, planet | Categories: Uncategorized