Measuring Impact

With the release of the Chrome browser, Google presented two ways to measure its global impact with the localization of its Web browser: languages available and presence in number of countries. (Take a look at the opening line of this article.)

Gerv and I have both blogged a bit about how Mozilla tries to measure the impact that its community has by localizing Firefox for Web users across the globe.   Specifically, we look at both the number of localizations and the percent of the world’s Internet population covered by Firefox with our translations.  We don’t really measure by country boundaries.

But, to see how we rated against this Chrome metric, Pascal ran an analysis to see how many countries a user could find Firefox.  He started by looking at the total number of countries listed by the U.N. Then, he looked at the Wikipedia entry for each country to find the official language spoken.  By that count, Firefox is in 161 countries.

If we were to add that to our list of metrics, for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.0.2, we can provide the following about Firefox:

• Firefox is present in 161 countries
• Firefox is localized in 57 languages officially shipped across three platforms
• Firefox has 93.1%* of the world’s Internet population covered

I guess my first question that comes up when I think about coverage in terms of countries:  what happens to languages that do not map to geopolitical boundaries?  Guys like Erdal from our Kurdish localization probably have some thoughts on that.  What about India?  Do the people in Andhra Pradesh think that India can be represented as a country if Telugu is not a localized option for their browser?

Admittedly, I think our metrics are a better measurement (though slightly incomplete…see below) of the impact of a localization effort.  It would be nice to open this conversation to the guys at IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Flock, etc.  We have a lot of open discussions about security, performance, and standards.  How are these other browsers looking at localization metrics?   Did the Chrome team use the same methodology we did above to get the number of countries?  What are the other metrics that help illustrate impact?  Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but I’d like to learn more from the other localization teams.

*  I’ve mentioned before how we get this percentage and that our model is a bit incomplete, but here is how we think about our metrics:

Our goal is to count the number of people in the world speaking different languages who have access to the Internet, irrespective of country boundary, and then see where Firefox localizations provide coverage.  Our premise is that some countries (like the U.S.) have people whose native language may not be the official language of that country.  Therefore, we’ve set up a matrix where across the top we list most languages spoken in the world.  We have a column that lists all countries.  Then, we do as much research as possible to find out how many people in each country speak another language “at home”.  The assumption is that people who speak a different language at home would also like to browse the Web in those languages.  In the case of the U.S., one might expect to see its population speaking English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and so on.  The biggest challenge is getting accurate data of who speaks what languages in each country.