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Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Launch Day In Retrospect

Posted by timothy on from the oh-comrades-those-were-fine-days dept.

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!"

2 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. I think they did too much work on localization. by Steamhead · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.
    1. Re:I think they did too much work on localization. by belmolis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.