Mozilla Firebird 0.6 Available in French

Monday May 19th, 2003

Filip writes: "The frenchmozilla team is proud to announce the release of Mozilla Firebird 0.6 in French."

#1 This is great. A couple of questions.

by asa

Monday May 19th, 2003 9:17 AM

What kind of experience was it localizing Mozilla Firebird compared to Mozilla SeaMonkey? Was any of the SeaMonkey browser language pack reusable?

--Asa

#2 Re: This is great. A couple of questions.

by filip

Monday May 19th, 2003 10:29 AM

Hello To respond to your questions :

The experience is a little different, we have taken a lot of the work made for the localization of mozilla in french. We have copied the files when they are identicals and uses them when there was difference between the mozilla and Firebird versions. The works was a little different from the SeaMonkey also because we have not made diff between 2 versions (1.3 and now 1.4b for mozilla for exemple) but rather uses multiples sources of informations : English firebird (0.5 and 0.6), french phoenix 05 and mozilla (english and french).

We have also worked on a nightly (because of the time between 0.5 and 0.6) so we have checked regulary on bonzai and lxr for evolutions in locale directory.

It was a lot of work but we are happy to make it. Go now to 0.7 or 1.5 :)

Ps. There are a few strings no localisable in firebird (peharps mozilla too), I have open some bugs in bugzilla for them.

Bye and thanks for the work. Filip

#3 Re: This is great. A couple of questions.

by benoit

Monday May 19th, 2003 10:57 AM

We still have some problems with the extensions. While in Mozilla everything is built-in, Firebird relies on several extensions, depending on the user needs.

It would be useful to have guidelines for both localizers and extensions makers explaining how localization is (or will be) planned in this more modular system (see e.a. bug #204176 and bug #135740).

#4 Re: Re: This is great. A couple of questions.

by asa

Monday May 19th, 2003 6:13 PM

benoit, the "official" extensions, like Chatzilla, Dom Inspector and Venkman, will follow the mozilla guidelines for being localizable. Unofficial extensions, like those at mozdev and elsewhere have always been a "mixed bag" with some being localizable and some not. I'm not sure how much mozilla.org can do to influence people building these 3rd party apps except to recommend that they consider localizability issues. This is nothing new, however, extensions for SeaMonkey are that way. Some are localizable (and even heavily localized) and some are not.

--Asa

#5 Re: Re: Re: This is great. A couple of questions.

by filip

Tuesday May 20th, 2003 12:32 AM

I don't think benoit wants to localize extensions :) The problem is that there are extentions that are broken when you use a french mozilla firebird browser. Somes work but produce Xul errors in some parts of their ui (in general in parameter where you have a lot of text :). The general question is : that's the fault of the localization or of the extensions who don't accept the browser in other lang than en-US (or other :).

Philippe

PS. A Mac firebird guru is needed to make a french build in mac version (solaris too).

#6 Re: Re: Re: This is great. A couple of questions.

by benoit

Tuesday May 20th, 2003 6:40 AM

I understand that, but the fact is that the all the extensions will never be localized in every language. The locale is is currently defined application-wide, fine... but the fact that an extension isn't localized shouldn't stop it from working.

We need some sort of reliable fallback mechanism to en-US when the extension doesn't support the "global" language. ATM it is not. Some extensions does work well despite remaining in english, some only partially, some not at all.