• Does localizing the Getting Started page lead to a better end-user experience for Firefox?

    June 17th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    Have you had a chance to look at the Getting Started page lately?  I really like the design, interaction, and contents of the page.  Each localized version has a Work, Learn, Play, and Connect section where we feature websites or add-ons for end-users to check out.  That’s right, each l10n team works with the l10n-drivers to determine the best local services to feature on this page.  Subsequently, the l10n-drivers team has compiled research on websites and services that are popular in roughly seventy-five local markets.  Not every locale has a robust set of local services, so sometimes the en-US defaults ship.  But, I really believe this page can be a critical step in helping users optimize their experience on the Web.

    Here’s a little anecdote on why I believe that.

    Although it may be known by some, we try to ship each localized version of Firefox with a language dictionary so users can have the same spell-checking functionality in their native language that en-US users have when writing web mail, blogs, or whatever.  Sometimes, licensing issues determine if we can ship Firefox with a particular dictionary.  If an open source license prevents us from shipping that dictionary, the dictionary still can be created as an add-on and offered to end users from our Add-ons website via the Getting Started page.

    This was the case in Denmark.  When a license prevented a dictionary from shipping, our localizers thought creatively and suggested that we feature the Danish add-on on the Getting Started page.  The experiment resulted in a bit of a surprise.  The link became the most popular click-through on the page!  See the attached image I mocked up.

    Danish Getting Started page

    The above image is a “heat map” from the month of May that shows total number of user clicks and the ranking of those links out of the total number of points of interaction on the page.  You can see that the dictionary ranked one out of twenty-eight with 2,216 clicks.  I’d like to think that over 2,000 users added the dictionary after clicking.  When you check the download statistics on the add-on’s page, you can see that it is quite popular.

    Where else could we see this benefit to dictionaries?  I suspect that it would be useful to present dictionary add-ons on the Getting Stared pages where bilingual users are prevalent.  Don’t hesitate to make the suggestion to us and we’ll make the change if feasible. And, if you are a localizer who faces a licensing conflict with a dictionary, please let us know.  Let’s put it on the Getting Started page.

  • How do we scale the Mozilla localization community?

    June 5th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    Between the release of Firefox 3 and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla will add twenty-six new localizations to the Firefox’s list of localized versions.  It’s likely that we will ship Firefox in seventy-four locales, not including the en-US version.  What does it take to scale our community and increase our locale count by over fifty-four percent?

    It turns out that many who learn about our growth often ask if we can articulate any of the magic behind this scale.  It’s not really magical, and it’s pretty straight forward.  In fact, I’ve been meaning to write something on my blog about our process to describe the many things that make this possible.  Coincidentally, Greg Bell, who helps run the website Open Logic, learned of our growth and asked me if I’d answer this very question in a post for his site.  This seemed like the best opportunity since Greg provided a deadline that would force me finally to write it.  He and his staff titled the article Go Local, Be Global: Scaling the Mozilla Localization Community and they wrote a very nice introduction about Mozilla.  I hope you find time to read it.

    Of course, it’s quite easy to write a piece like this when we have a remarkable community of contributors.  Special thanks has to go out to the l10n community and l10n-drivers team who have been building for years the foundation that has made this scale possible.  Most of all, Axel Hecht and Pascal Chevrel have been the two Mozilla employees most responsible for our global growth.  Hats of to them.

    Finally, many thanks to Greg for offering me the opportunity to write.  He caught me at the height of our Firefox 3.5 release work, so it took me a few more weeks than expected to write it. Luckily, he let me slip my deadline twice until I finally got this together.

  • NSPR/NSS/JSS Mac OS X build/QA/tinderbox support

    June 2nd, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    The beginning of the title to this post is either a really poor set of letters for a game of Scrabble, or…

    In December, 2008, the Community Giving Program provided five Mac Minis to the NSS community that are being used as 1) an internal build machine, 2) an internal nightly automated QA machine, 3) an NSS stable branch tinderbox, 4) an NSS trunk tinderbox, and 5) a developer test/QA machine.

    Today, on behalf of the NSS community, Glen Beasley updated me with a quick report:

    “We have been running full internal build/QA on two of the Mac Mini’s. These reports can be sent to external NSS users if they request to be on the list. We also have tinderboxes for 32 bit and 64 bit Mac OS X builds.”

    http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/NSS/

    “In the past months the Mac OS tinderbox’s have revealed a few developer build breakages and QA issues that likely would have gone unnoticed for several days/weeks had we not had the tinderbox/build machines in place.”

    The first four machines benefit Mac OS X support because, in the past, we have gone weeks before finding out that a Mac OS build had been broken by a checkin.   With more solid Tier 1 build/QA support for Mac OS X, the community has been able to find breakages sooner.  Finally, the last Mini is accessible by NSS developers to address build/regression failures and develop Mac OS X specific functionality.

    It should also be mentioned that anyone interested in contributing to the NSPR/NSS/JSS team should comment here and I will be sure to make the introductions to Glen and the team.

    As always, if you know of any potential recipients for Community Giving program that would empower someone or a community with Mozilla, please let me know.  Though I focus mostly on Localization, this program is still thriving and we are always seeking leveraged opportunities to support recipients.

  • L10n web dashboard improvements

    June 1st, 2009 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    At the beginning of this quarter, the l10n-drivers set a goal to improve our dashboards so people could begin to use them as both communication platforms and better aggregators of l10n information.  Among the many things he is presently doing for our localization community, Pascal has been hard at work on improving Mozilla’s web l10n dashboard.  Here is a summary of his changes:

    Communication improvements

    • Placed a highly visible subscription link to the RSS feed so updates to relevant bugs are seen immediately by localizers
    • Began sorting feeds chronologically with better description of tasks
    • Fixed a bug on feed page so that the feed now leads directly to a locale’s page
    • Added “last update of data” information on pages
    • Improved the readability with CSS and template changes

    Organization of locales

    • Added the metalocale ‘es’ Spanish for tracking of projects shared by all Spanish-speaking teams (mostly marketing sites and support)
    • Added the locales es-CL, ms, or, rm, ta-LK

    Projects views

    • Added support for a bug to belong to multiple projects in tracking sections
    • Added new subsections for Firefox 3.5 release for tracking
      • Projects and sections can be added/removed editing a config file, useful for short term projects like mini-sites

    New tool  

    • main.lang checker, which I blogged about in the past
    • Warns the localizer of UI strings missing or identical to en-GB (as the reference locale) on mozilla.com/mozilla europe/mozilla messaging
    • Added main.lang checker data to the web dashboard
      • if main.lang files are out of date, it is displayed in the rss feed and the web dashboard page

    Other