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

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".

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.