A look at Microsoft’s website for downloading localized versions of IE8

A while back, Tristan passed me a blog post by the Internet Explorer 8 team that announced the availability of IE8 in over sixty languages.  Their opening quote: “We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 in 20 additional languages today.  Internet Explorer 8 is now available in a total of 63 languages!”  That’s a nice accomplishment by their team and congratulations.

I went to their site to investigate how Microsoft offers downloads of their localized versions and noticed some distinctions between the Firefox and IE8 experience.

Most interesting for me off the bat, IE8 is offering some languages Firefox does not have, including Konkani, Kyrgyz, Malay, and Uzbek (Latin).  Those are the languages listed on their blog, but I am not sure if that is a comprehensive list of the differences, so I could use some help on determining where we fall short.  It’s hard for me to tell from the official download page, which lists eighty-five different “county/region” selections, bringing me to my next observation.

Microsoft asks in English for its users to select a “country/region” and operating system.  Then, they automatically send users to a localized download page.  That seems to be pretty nice, perhaps a user experience person could give me an opinion.  Looking at the list, I did see some Indian language fonts, indicating Indian versions, but I don’t know if that corresponds directly to a country or region.  Either way, the count in that drop down selector is around eighty-five.  Therefore, I don’t know if they offer sixty-three or eight-five localizations.  Either number is impressive.

In addition to all this, Microsoft’s “Worldwide Sites” page lists fifty-four “country-languages” for a user to select that will change the UI of the website to that country-language.  Mozilla does not distinguish based on country specifically; we simply list languages.  Interestingly, they have several versions of French available for France, Canada, Switzerland, and North Africa.  Mozilla lists only one version of French.

At Mozilla, we do not offer downloads based on “country/region” because we feel that it is best to showcase the language of the localization, not the geopolitical boundary.  For instance, in India, we have eleven different localization teams, so isolating downloads to country/region didn’t seem to get users exactly what they wanted.  Instead, we try to provide the best possible download by looking at the language of the browser in use at the moment of a visit to Mozilla for download and offering the version that matches that language.  If we cannot recognize the existing language, we have a series of fall-back options in our website code that tries to offer the best possible download.  If that doesn’t work, the en-US page provides an “Other Systems and Languages” link available just under the main download box.  That takes users to our all.html page where all of our localizations can be seen.

Just looking at the copy of the Microsoft download site, the IE8 team states that the browser is available in many “locales/languages”.  We use a bit different terminology in an attempt to distinguish the term “localization” from “language”.  For Mozilla, localizations are partly identified by the language of the UI.  But, a localization is customized to the region where the language is most prevalently spoken.  For instance, using our eleven Indian localizations as an example again, each team is able to customize their version of the browser so that web services like search or protocol handlers are packaged together in one download.  It may be a nuance, but for Mozilla, we try not to interchange language and localization.

Lastly, I am not quite sure how those sixty-three (eighty-five) languages are shipped to end-users.  Does Microsoft ship each version simultaneously? Or, are versions offered as “downloadable” packs after major release in Englsh?  In the past, I had heard that IE only ships one version (en-US) at the time of a major release.  But, I suspect that has changed, I just couldn’t find the information anywhere.  Please link me in the comments if you know.