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Help me test two Kiswahili versions of Firefox
Surely, you saw me fire off a response two weeks ago about playing politics with our Kiswahili localization communities. Let’s move on from that flame war by summarizing our situation and presenting a path to a solution.
Presently, we have two communities, the tzLUG and the Kilinux teams, who have translated the Firefox application into Kiswahili (sw-TZ). Unfortunately, we have had tough luck in getting an unbiased, thorough evaluation of each body of work to help us decide which one to use. As it turned out, it was hard to find a number of individuals familiar enough with technical writing and Kiswahili who had time on their hands to volunteer for Mozilla. Furthermore, we didn’t have an easy package to evaluate, except for the “diff” of the code differences between the two. Yeah, that sounds ugly and it was. Still is.
To solve what has become a long-standing debate, we asked each team leader to create a Mozilla language pack of their work as an add-on that we would then host on and promote though our addons.mozilla.org website. Both teams agreed and uploaded their versions. Since then, I created two separate “collections” that bundle each language pack with Ben Smedberg’s Locale Switcher addon. Our hope is that end-users ready to test will install both versions and use the addons.mozilla.org site to provide feedback to each developer team.
If you are interested in testing each version, please install the following two collections:
- Kilinux: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.kilinux
- tzLUG: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/kiswahili.tzlug
Once you have installed these, you can switch between the two versions and your English interface by going to the menu item Tools –> Languages…
Now for testing…
Requirements: You must be able to read Swahili and English fluently and you must use Firefox.
If you choose to test these localization language packs, you’ll need to follow something similar to the “Firefox 3.5 Localizer Test Run” that has been created in Litmus, Mozilla’s testing application. If you use Litmus, please follow the steps I have posted in the first comment on this blog post.
You can also just use each language pack and keep notes of errors you spot. Whether you choose to use Litmus or not, please record any translation errors that you find in the user interface of each version. Please be very descriptive and thorough with any notes you keep, and write the notes in English. Take a look at the word choices, terminology, spelling, grammar, etc. and keep a record of errors you see. When you are finished, you can submit your evaluation to me. Just ping me on this blog.
As always, please ask some questions if you have them. Nothing is off limits.
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NSPR/NSS/JSS Mac OS X build/QA/tinderbox support
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.
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Did Firefox market share cause major changes to online banking in Taiwan?
On February 27, 2007, Gen Kanai wrote an excellent blog post titled the cost of monoculture, which describes the state of the Web in Korea. Gen unfolds the decisions made by the Korean government that have forced computer/Internet users to use Microsoft’s ActiveX control to do any encrypted communication online.
Luckily, this extreme monoculture does not exist in most other countries, but it doesn’t mean that users are always free to choose whatever browser they want when doing things like banking transactions. Sites are still being created that require an ActiveX control to do encrypted communication.
For example, in Taiwan many people use Web ATM to do online banking. The Taiwan Review wrote an interesting article in 2005 called, “A Web of Opportunity“. In that article, they discuss the benefits of Web ATM:
“Some forward-looking local banks have introduced a new solution, Web ATM, a Web page that allows payers to transfer funds directly using a chip-stored identity card and their own card reader. Chip cards are much safer than the magnetic strip variety and as a consequence of this heightened security, Taiwan’s banks are now required to replace magnetic strip ATM cards with them.”
The problem is that all banks with Web ATM service required an ActiveX control, so users had to no choice but to use Internet Explorer.
Until now.
We recently got word that E.SUN Bank’s Web ATM became the first to support Firefox (and other browsers with the same plug-in framework) on Windows. What an accomplishment and a step forward for banking on the Web in Taiwan!
I began to wonder about E.SUN’s motivation for this change.
- Did E.SUN Bank do this because of changes in browser market share?
- Did their users demand Firefox support?
- Was there a business opportunity for them to be the first to market?
- Are they a progressive organization promoting open standards for the Web?
Regardless of the strategic motivation behind this decision, online banking just changed in Taiwan and users benefit by now having more choice on the Web.
Soon after this decision, our Taiwanese localization team contacted us to ask how we can feature and promote this new service. In this bug, you’ll see the discussion and decision to feature E.SUN Bank on pages that we serve to Taiwanese Firefox users on Windows. Staś really sums it up best with his opening remark:
“E.SUN Bank from Taiwan has done a big effort to make their website available for Firefox users. This is an important step for Firefox adoption in the region and consequently, we would like to feature a link to their website for a certain period of time on the zh-TW web parts (whatsnew, firstrun and central pages)….The important thing is to show the link only to Windows users. We would love to see this live for the 3.0.8 release.”
Web evangelism efforts like these are taking place in Mozilla locales across the globe. Without having much to do with it, I am still proud of the accomplishment and that we can shine a spotlight on E.SUN Bank for crossing that frontier. A big congratulations is due to E.SUN Bank, the MozTW team (Bob Chao, Tim Dream, and flybird), and Gen. Thank you, guys.
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New Xserve will serve AMO, IT, and SeaMonkey
The Community Giving & Empowerment program recently approved the purchase of an Xserve for community use. This resource extends our long-lasting goal of providing leveraged resources to the community. Here’s why:
- The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) editor community will use this Xserve to test extensions on platforms where some of them lack access. They filed this bug, which provides more background on the need.
- The SeaMonkey team filed a request with this bug to get more virtual machines for testing. It took us some time to process as we decided what was best and most leveraged.
- Finally, the server will be used as a place for the IT community (with AMO and SeaMonkey) to test virtualization of OSX.
Just today, I was at a conference and was asked what we mean by providing leveraged resources to our community. This is a good example. With the Xserve, we are serving many different purposes: hundreds of thousands SeaMonkey users will benefit; all add-on editors can now test on three platforms, which may result in quicker processing of the sandbox where new add-ons go before being listed on AMO; and, the IT community will use the Xserve to test virtualization.
Finally, if anyone is asking, I am still managing community requests, but at a slower pace for two reasons: community requests have slowed down a bit since we launched the program a couple years back, and localization occupies most of my time so I don’t do as aggressive outreach as I did in the past. But, we are receiving requests and I do get to them. If you’ve contacted me about a request, we will respond.
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70 locales
It’s been a busy week for the l10n team. Has anyone else been following the l10n release tracking bugs for Firefox 3.5? Take a look at this dependency tree from Bugzilla showing 79 open bugs for potential locales. That’s a rough list of the upcoming locales for Firefox 3.5. Please keep in mind that this does not mean that we will add all these langauges for the upcoming release. But, I will say that we will add *some* number of those listed. In fact, just this past week, Axel added the following localizations (language, primary region, locale code) to the l10n dashboard:
- Bengali, Bangladesh, bn-BD
- Oriya, India, or
- Spanish, Mexico, es-MX
- Croatian, Croatia, hr
If the locale is building on the dashboard, it means Mozilla’s build and release team is now officially generating localized versions of that language. It doesn’t mean they are usable versions, but localizers work on translations until their builds are green. If you looked at that l10n dashboard link from above and click on ff31x in the “Tree” section , then you’ll see that we are now building 70 versions of Firefox!
It’s likely that we will also a new version of English for South Africa, Kazakh, a version of Tamil for Sri Lanka, and Assamese at some point during Firefox 3.5. Finally, we are doing active outreach and support to Swahili, Malay, and Azerbaijani. This happens primarily because of the drive and passion of individuals who are eager to translate into their native language (they’re listed above in that bug tree). But, it’s also due to some specific community folks:
- Axel Hecht
- Pascal Chevrel
- Staś Małolepszy
- Zbigniew Braniecki
- Gervase Markham
- The Release Engineering team
Now, to reel in the celebration a bit, it’s easy to get excited by these numbers, but we put in serious effort to make sure we can scale…and we’re starting to feel the pressure. Managing 70 locales across three platforms is not an easy task. Look for more blog posts from me on what we are doing to sustain this pace.
community website
