• Firefox 3.5 beta 4, 70 localizations

    April 15th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 19 comments »

    Holy crap, that’s a lot!

    For those who might not have been on today’s Firefox call at 11 AM (UTC -7), Axel announced that we have 69 locales participating in beta 4. (After the meeting, Macedonia went green!!) The number is huge, but it was the effort and patience from our localizers that was most impressive.  Here’s why they made it a success:

    • In the initial communication about Firefox 3.5 beta 4, we mentioned that the new beta would only be about 20 strings.  It turned out to be 145 to translate!  That’s not trivial.  In terms of time required to do this, it goes from probably 1 hour to 1 day of work, depending on localizer familiarity with the process.  No one complained about the increase in strings…
    • Along the way, the code freeze slipped to April 15, after we pushed everyone to be ready by April 6.  Again, no complaints from our localizers…
    • Bugs regarding siteSearch and Mibbit caused some “breakage” to all of our localizations.  Stas asked everyone over a few posts to the l10n newsgroup for their patience and understanding until proper policies were established on how to resolve bugs.   And, no complaints from the localizers, once again…

    In the end 70 of our 71 localizations made it into the beta process, making this our most successful localized beta ever.

    Special congratulations to six new locales who will participate:

    1. Spanish (Mexican)
    2. Kazakh (Kazakhstan)
    3. Bengali (Bengladesh)
    4. Assamese (India)
    5. Croatian (Croatia)
    6. Tamil (India)

    This one is nearly passed off to build and then we’ll be moving on to the Firefox 3.5 release candidates and final release.  Can we get over 70?  I’d bet on it.

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