Michal's blog

Brand new languages shipping in Firefox 3 Beta5

We are very happy to report that we will have five new languages will be released in our upcoming Beta of Firefox 3. These locales are Afrikaans, Indonesian, Mongolian, Norwegian nynorsk, and  Serbian. We would greatly appreciate your help in reviewing those versions when they are released in the next few days. You will be able to download them by either checking out Mozilla's all-beta download page or do a search for "Firefox Beta 5". If you find things that can be improved please file a bug or send me feedback in this post. Thanks and most especially thanks to the localizers responsible for these new builds.

Protocol Handlers - Firefox 3 en-US defaults

We've just set the en-US defaults for mailto and calendar protocols for the upcoming major release of Firefox (release 3.0). They are being tracked in bug 413630.

The defaults will be:
mailto: Gmail, YahooMail, Windows Live Hotmail
calendar: Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, 30 boxes.

These should work internationally but of course for each locale we'll create and track bugs for changes on these defaults.

In doing the research and gathering some feedback from localizers worldwide there seems to be more choice for local webmail providers than web calendar providers. I guess the localization of calendar is not yet that popular.

If you feel we may have missed something major in the choice of these defaults, I'm open for feedback. :) And, as always, we can make changes for locales that offer local language and good user choice options.

Firefox 3 Web services

Web services are currently: search plug-ins, Live Bookmark (RSS Feed), RSS Readers and the new protocol handlers which for Firefox 3 will include mailto and calendar.

We recently developed a new set of guidelines to help localizers recommend these web services for their languages or locales. It's often a daunting task to try and figure out what users will want and we hope these guidelines will help.

I also regularly do research in languages we're working on and reach out to other members of the community for help in making recommendations. So please don't feel you're on your own in making these decisions.

Any feedback on the guidelines would be most welcomed.

Web Services for Firefox 3

I'm pretty excited for the upcoming release of Firefox 3 - we have been working at many improvements in the Localization approach - and this year we managed to ship over 18 locale's for Firefox 3 Beta 1 (first time we've ever done that!).
I will be working with Mike Beltzner over the next few weeks to write up guidelines for the web services like Search, RSS, etc that can be customized for local markets. These will compliment the existing Firefox 3 localization page. As an example, I recently learned that the motivation behind including the BBC feed in Firefox was to demonstrate the dynamic, fun and potentially entertaining use of embedding and RSS feed into your Firefox chrome. I had thought we chose the BBC for the comprehensiveness of the news content (which I'd previously written in some bugs). All that to say the new guidelines should enable some great local user choices that really show off Firefox well. And, I look forward to having those kinds of discussions with localizers to make Firefox more relevant in local languages.

RSS in Firefox

My responsibility on the Firefox team is to support internationalization of Firefox. One of the things I do is review international locations for choices on product elements such as search engine, RSS feeds and RSS readers. The objective generally is, of course, to provide the best user experience by creating choice across these elements.

Defining the "best" in each locale is often difficult for me as my context is limited to the languages I speak and geographic locations I've lived. In our upcoming major release of Firefox 3 we will be adding capabilities for protocol handlers. As such I'm looking for help in finding good sources of information on international choices for RSS readers and feeds and search engine's. There was some good debate in the Mozilla L10n (localization) Forum on Google Groups, and there are some great bugs (much as bugs can be great ;) that illustrate the challenge of finding good choices. I hope you can help me find good sources e.g., lists of international choices across these product elements.

Thanks

Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson's

I'm currently reading this book by Andrea Mandel Campbell. It was recommended to me by Roger Martin and thus far it's been an excellent study of the Canadian historical context around innovation and business building. Two things I am keenly passionate about. I have sent this book to at least 3 people I know and thus far consider it to be an important part of context setting on how to be a successful entrepreneur in Canada - what we're up against and how others have succeeded before us.

Prosperity and Innovation

I recently attended the release of the September 2007 report from the Centre for Innovation and Prosperity in Ontario. There were some great examples of folks in the community battling poverty on the ground and generally working to enhance Canada's capability to compete by focusing on education and youth. As well as improving coordination among government agencies to better support new Canadian Citizens.

My notes follow (fwiw) the highlight for me though was Roger Martin's insight that Canadian corporate elite have a misconception or fear of re-investing profits, amazing as that is.

Prosperity and Innovation September report - Notes

• transfer payment/redistribution has not helped inequality
  is the middle class disappearing? (globe printed this chart) no, not really (slight percentage decrease)
• are poor getting poorer and rich getting richer
  increases in inequality are predominantly a function of rich getting richer than the median Ontarian vs the poorer getting worse off than the median
• corporate profits going up but wages, salaries and supplementary income going down
• fear in Canada that if investing like crazy will be bought by private equity; need to take profits and re-invest
• when we don't grow large pie as well, we reduce our ability to keep up look at 1980-90 at 20th percentile income our gap was out-performing peer states now we're not
• encouraging folks to go to university is a good thing to do as it increases likelihood of higher wages
• immigrants even more likely to be unemployed (below poverty line): immigration policy has changed we de-linked economic performance to allowing immigrants in - invite them in at a time when getting a job is really tough
• only 18% of Cdn vs 25.6% of Americans are educated at University level. immigrants are more educated.
• Pathways example on importance of education - Regent Park in Toronto. This was a pretty profound presentation and grounded in reality. For example, the head of the program spoke about support and holding young person accountable to decision, the fact that you can't just throw money at it, the community needs to want it and participate in it (it has to come from them and be part of them)
• TRIAC:
  biggest complaint: Canadian experience and education
  better connections between departments
  availability of programs
  hire immigrants.ca

Draft

This will be a case studies of companies I'm working with for example, Tailor Design in Toronto. I'm helping Iris Glazer (CEO/founder) to grow her company and move into a "Green" specialization as well as plan for a break (Iris is pregnant now and wants to plan to continue her business through this personal change). Iris is willing to allow me to run a blog post of our conversations (I always take notes on the call and send them to her post the calls). this would be useful for others i think.