Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Launch Day In Retrospect

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is linking to a weblog posting by Mitchell Baker, mozilla.org's Chief Lizard Wrangler and President of the Mozilla Foundation, in which she gives an insight into what happened at the Mozilla Foundation's offices on November 9th 2004: the day that Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released. The account is very much people-based and therefore adds a human side to Mozilla development and allows you to get an idea about the people behind Firefox (most of whom, of course, were also the people behind Netscape previously). A must-read for all fans of servers going down an hour before a major release!"

Comments

Aha

[Rares Marian]

Yet another reason for using cron-apt. It got here just in time.

Re:Aha

[oniony]

I'd like to know how many users were scooped through the NYT advertisement.

Re:Aha

[Rares Marian]

I wonder how many people downloaded it even though .999999 was working just fine.

A Readers Digest Story

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a wonderful entry which would also go in as aReader Digest Story. Anyone listen. Point the folks at Reader Digest to this story.It's now grandma's,uncles',aunt's and young cousins chance of getting the firefox and inspired as being a part of revolution.
I read about Bill Gates,Sabir Bhatia,Michael Dell at Readers Digest only.

Re:A Readers Digest Story

[Anonymous Coward]

At www.rd.com, there is an "e-mail the editors" link.

Blogs in open-source as a way of communication

[vladd_rom]

I think it's great that this kind of phenomenen starts to happen in open source. Asa Dotzler is trilled as well. According to this, he thought "blogs would become a more important tool in Mozilla communications, offering a new level of insight and transparency".

Re:Blogs in open-source as a way of communication

[NamShubCMX]

I agree. Although many people see blogs as narcissic, useless ramblings, I think developers' blog, at least those where they talk about the software more than about their personal lives, are really fun to read to know what happens with the dev and their code between the changelogs :) I like to read PlanetKDE, PlanetGnome and the various mozilla-related blogs, for example.

Geek reality-TV? :P

Re:Blogs in open-source as a way of communication

[Juanvaldes]

People really need to get off the blog hate. As you illustrate blogs allow developers to communicate about they are up to, plan, collaborate and discuss who something of mutual interest should progress. Now take this and build it out and you can see mothers discussing parenting, cooking, stocks, movies, what have you. I look at blogs and see the fulfillment of the original promise of the web. Allowing normal people to have their own sites and put up whatever they want to share with the world. Nothing more nothing less. /minor rant

Two questions.

[Gothic_Walrus]

A must-read for all fans of servers going down an hour before a major release!

Does anyone else find any irony in this being posted as part of a Slashdot story? :)

Also, how many users who read this are going to do it through Firefox? I'm really curious as to what the percentage would be...

Re:Two questions.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am reading this thru Firefox 1.0 :)

Re:Two questions.

[magefile]

In response to a sibling post ... I too am posting this from FF 1.0

I think they did too much work on localization.

[Steamhead]

Adding 50 or 60 builds (20 languages, 3 platforms each) to a release is a big deal and Chase spun many sets of localized builds. The last planned spin of all localized builds was at 10am Monday morning.

They could have easily used mac os x's built in localization APIs and saved themselves an easy 20 builds! Hosnestly, I don't know about Windows or Linux programming, but in Mac OS X, you can easily use published API's to do the dirty work for you.

Re:I think they did too much work on localization.

[belmolis]

The same is true in the UNIX world. The GNU gettext package lets you internationalize your program just once by replacing each string by a call to a function that uses the string as an index into a message catalog for the appropriate language. Producing a new translation is then just a matter of producing a message catalog for that language. I believe that GNU gettext works on any POSIX-compliant system. I don't know for sure, but it probably works on MS Windows.

I was surprised to see that Firefox had separate builds for each language. I don't know why it was done that way. In addition to greatly increasing the amount of code they have to keep on the server , it means that you can't switch languages using the same copy of the program. You need to run a separate copy for each language.

Re:I think they did too much work on localization.

[shepard]

Localizing Firefox is as simple as installing a xpi for that language and setting it as your default locale. The difficulty is in localizing the Windows and Unix installers, legacy applications. Each localized build not only has the separate locale xpi, it sets that locale to be that build's default, and configures the installer with a complete set of strings for that locale that are inserted at compile-time.

If you want to help update our installer software, contact me at cmp at m.o (I'm the tech lead for Mozilla releases). I can point you in the right direction to get started. Being proficient in C, Unix and Windows programming would make the task easier.