Data regarding the Firefox 3 beta testing community of localizations
This past summer, our summer intern Blake Cutler spent a lot of time analyzing data about the localization community. One thing he examined was the size of our l10n beta testing community across various locales. With the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1, I thought I would share a series of charts that show us a bit of that information leading up to the release of Firefox 3. The charts reference “AUS ping” data. For an explanation of that, I’ve linked to a long post by John Lilly where he describes the “application update service“. (Just search for it, it’s in the body of the long post.)
Keep in mind that the data visualized below shows information about some, but not all of our localization communities. It would be very difficult to create a meaningful chart that shows information on every locale. The first chart shows the number of downloads of Firefox 3 beta in May, 2008. The information is presented with daily AUS pings on the horizontal axis and monthly Firefox 3 downloads on the vertical axis. (Apologies for the size of these charts. Please use your Full Page Zoom feature to get a larger view.)
This next chart is just a zoom into that bottom left corner. Same data, just closer…
And, a little bit closer….
When I saw these charts, one question came to mind. How can we grow our localization communities so all localizers can benefit from having thousands of beta users? I am really looking for some comments or other interpretations of this data. What else would you like to know? We used Google motion charts to generate the information. Perhaps we can look at the data to get some new information. Not sure, but tell me and we can try it.
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I think you mean Blake Cutler.
|How can we grow our localization communities so all
|localizers can benefit from having thousands of beta
|users?
Hey Seth, remember that discussion about an “all-locales firefox”??
Imagine all beta-users to be able to switch between languages with an addon that helps to retrieve/download/install the langpacks for the specified release?
Everybody could be testing any locale without having to download the multiple binaries and all the hazzle
I installed “Quick Locale Switcher” which allows you to select any locale. The main missing part is that allows you to select a locale even if you don’t have the langpack installed. If somebody added the feature to download the langpack from our servers, we would have any locales being retrieved to something like this add-on
Hey armenyzg:
I do remember that discussion. I actually investigated it briefly by chatting with mconnor and rstrong, two individuals I thought would be particularly helpful in handling this problem.
Regarding the “Quick Locale Switcher”, not sure how we can make that happen. I want to look more closely at locale switcher to see what we can learn there. Seems like this points to a whole other issue: how to improve the installation experience to allow people to grab as many languages as possible at install.