We want the world to know more about what makes Firefox different: that we’re a non-profit organization aimed at keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands. Our hope is that through high-quality videos made by our commity and Firefox fans from all around the world, we can help mainstream Internet users know more about the issues that affect their online lives and, more importantly, how Firefox as a product addresses these issues.

Since the very beginning, we’ve been promoting the project via mozilla.org website, and after that we started working on the Firefox Flicks content website. As most of the stuff we’re working on, most products and websites, that is, we wanted to give people opportunity to read this website in their own language, as well, so we once again asked our tremendous localization community to join us on our journey. We’ve created a thread on mailing list, and immediately got opt-ins from several languages. Yes, that’s how awesome we are!

Ever since then, a lot of teams within Mozilla were working on this, giving their best and staying up late, which eventually brought us a new website we’re really proud of: Firefox Flicks contest website! The website was released yesterday night(PDT), and besides default English(en-US), we can serve it in following languages: German(de), Spanish(es), French(fr), Ligurian(lij), Dutch(nl), Polish(pl), Brazilian Portuguese(pt-BR), Slovenian(sl) and Chinese(zh-CN). I’d like to use this chance and say “Way to go!” to everyone that have been involved in translating this project, as well as those that are about to join.

Just a note before I end this post: Winning videos will be used in worldwide marketing campaigns and public service announcements. The contest is planned to close on May 1.

Firefox logo

I’m going to make this one as short as possible.

We’ve been working hard on moving localized Firefox builds out of the beta channel straight into final releases, and that effort started paying off. There are several languages that are in the focus, and a few of them made significant progress in that field, even though for some of them we have only beta localized builds, still.

First of all, I’d like to shout “Yay!” to Armen, Jurk and Kerim for working hard on Armenian(hy-AM), Kashubian(csb) and Bosnian(bs) productization bits, respectively. Productization, for those who don’t already know, means adapting some Firefox features to a language/region. It includes default search engine set, protocol handlers, feed readers and livemarks(live bookmarks), along with a set of web pages on http://mozilla.org/firefox/ so that we are able to promote localized builds.

So, I’m happy to announce that we’ve made trumendeous progress with aforementioned three locales, and that we’ll be probably seeing them soon as final builds. For one, Bosnian locale is all done on its de-beta path, and we have managed to do everything in time for Firefox 8 release. So now, run to http://www.mozilla.org/bs/firefox/ and download Firefcfox!

I’m also happy to say that Armenian is probably going to follow the Bosnian path soon(I really hope that that’ll be for Firefox 9, in December), and that Kashubian should probably be joining final localized builds in the very beginning of 2012. Looking forward to that!

I will definitely use it in the future, so I created a web interface for it, so the user could choose component, product, version, bugs to block, whiteboardboard status and such.

On the road to make this work everything went pretty well. Bugzilla as a more-than-a-ticketing-system™ provides you with a publicly available config file, which is in JavaScript, and that contains all the component>product<version relations. So, I just set that js as an external script in my html, and I was ready to use the data arrays from it. On a landing page, index page, a user can choose everything he/she needs for his/her bugs. After clicking the submit button, data are sent using POST method to the actual script file, where data is parsed, convert to XML and sent to bugzilla as xml request. Bugzilla then answers every request with a just filed bug id, and we’re all good.

If you think my code is bad, or that you can do it better, feel free to fork or send me the patch. Code is at https://github.com/milossh/bugzilla-c3po

After the initial skin submission, I received awesome(marvelous?) feedback from Mozillians, and I tried to make it better in this new retouched skin. My main points of focus were the headers, or how to make them different(<h1> to <h4> at least). I really believe that I managed to do so, and that you’ll use it with ease.

Now, a brief comparison to Cavendish theme, the one we used so far:

• It looks pretty much the same as our mozilla.org template
• Main content area takes 77% of the screen, which allows people with wide screens forget about scrolling down a lot to see the whole page.
• Side menu use really small font size, so it doesn’t take a lot of space
• Headers have improved a lot: they’re quite different now so it’s a lot easier to distinguish paragraphs
• Code blocks are much cuter now
• Broken tab functionality on prefs page is fixed

Last but not the least, I’d like to thank everyone for a great feedback, and for making this possible!

NOTE: I’m still gonna work on this, and improve it even more based on your feedback. So, feel free to comment this post, send me an email( milos-on-mozilla-fullstop-com ) or file a bug.

After some time, I had a very informative chat with David Boswell, who asked me to help him make mozilla.org website localizable, so we can serve its content in many languages, just as we do with mozilla.com. My internship supervisor Pascal Chevrel and I agreed that I should spend some time working on that, integrating current mozilla.org content into the system Pascal was building for a few years now. We use that framework for mozilla-europe.org website, and it’s much similar to what we have on mozilla.com. After almost 2 months, I can say I’m almost done, and I’d like to present my work in this blog post.

All the development work can be seen on hagege branch on Mozilla’s public svn – http://svn.mozila.org/projects/mozilla.org/branches/hagege. Hagege is the name of the famous French poliglote who spoke 50 different languages fluently, and Pascal Chevrel is the one to blame for this marvelous symbolism.

As of this moment, we have 5 working languages, being English, Greek, French, Croatian(partially) and Hebrew. I won’t talk much, but I’ll post some pictures instead:

All in all, it looks pretty good, and if you want to check it out live and working, please visit http://hagege.stage.mozilla.com

Beside that, I have some more good news: wiki.mozilla.org got a new theme, and you’re all welcome to use it and give us your feedback. Here’s what it looks like:

This skin is currently optional skin, and you can test it by setting it as a default one in your user preferences on wiki.mozilla.org

All rights reserved by David Tenser - Used with permission - http://www.flickr.com/photos/djst/2127822846/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Hello David,
Thank you for agreeing to do this interview!
First things first: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you first got involved in Mozilla? I heard it was a long time ago

Yes, the years have definitely flied by. It started around the Netscape 6 days around 2001 when I discovered that Mozilla was basically the same thing as Netscape, only with different branding — or, rather, a lack of branding. Being the geek that I am, I wanted to learn more about this new open source project, so I started to participate in the newsgroups discussions and made connections with other people online. Before I knew it, I was pretty heavily involved with both asking and answering questions about the use, design, and direction of projects like the Mozilla suite and this new browser called Phoenix (which later became more known as Firefox).

Although I majored in Computer Science and have a history of software engineering, my involvement with Mozilla has mostly been focused on helping users. Part of the reason for that focus was that the Mozilla code base felt overwhelming and wasn’t something I had a strong desire to master. It was more fun to just help others while at the same time learning more and providing feedback on product features and decisions — especially since I was already busy with writing software in the non-Mozilla world. Also, helping people with computer problems has always been something I’ve enjoyed doing, so that part of me isn’t restricted to Mozilla.

So, that’s a bit of my history with the project. If you want the longer story, I wrote a longer blog post last year about what made me discover, and ultimately stay with Mozilla throughout all these years.

Aside from Mozilla, my main hobby is photography. I’m constantly on the lookout for new camera equipment, but I must admit I spend almost more time reading about cameras than actually using them. I guess that comes with the package of being a nerd. A more recent branch of this hobby is post-processing of photography, which I started to do this year. Being the open source evangelist as I am, GIMP is of course my photo editor of choice — actually, I even find it enjoyable to use now that I’ve set it up to use my custom keyboard shortcuts. It’s really not as bad as people say, it just takes a bit of time getting used to it!

Lastly, I’m Swedish, I live in Sweden, and I look pretty much exactly like the typical Swedish stereotype. I’m not a chef, though.

What did the very first SUMO looked like, and what were its pros and cons compared to the time it’s developed in?

The first version of SUMO, released in the fall of 2007, was very crude, but it still represented an important step up from the old support content that had been hosted on mozilla.org since the Firefox 1.0 launch in 2004. There were a number of improvements, but perhaps the main difference was that the support content was now hosted on a wiki, making it possible for people in the community to participate in the effort to improve the quality and grow the number of support articles. Essentially, the Firefox support became much more dynamic than it had been before.

Another benefit from the previous support content was that we now had the ability to see which articles were most popular, providing us with important insights about which problems Firefox users most frequently encountered. We could also finally see the most common search terms, browser usage stats, and much more. This led to an even faster growth of support articles and the ability to feature the most common support issues prominently on the support start page.

How it actually looked like? Here’s an old screenshot. Of course, a lot of things have improved over the three years SUMO has existed — it’s hard to even know where to start! Perhaps the most notable change is the sheer size of the project — both in terms of number of Firefox issues we have solutions for, and the number of people who devote time and energy every week to helping Firefox users have a better experience on the web. Our community is definitely the biggest strength with SUMO.

What’s the magic that got a lot of people involved in SUMO and why do you think a one would like to be a SUMO localizer?

I see two parts of the magic. One is the inherent magic of Mozilla itself and its products. If you’re helping people on SUMO, you do it because you love Mozilla’s products and believe in our mission.

The other part is the impact your contributions have on SUMO. Just as an example, if you spend just one hour to translate a popular support article into your language, that one-time effort can end up helping thousands of people every week. Depending on the language, your work could impact millions of users every year!

That said, there’s definitely a lot of magic yet to happen with the SUMO community — I don’t think we have truly taken off yet, despite having 50-100 active contributors every week. There are many areas where we can improve, and will improve. For example, we recently launched the Army of Awesome project, which focuses on helping people who are tweeting about their Firefox problems. It’s a great, fun, and simple way for anyone to give Firefox users a helping hand by pointing them in the right direction if they need assistance with solving a problem.

Another example is our upcoming knowledge base back-end, which is going to be a huge improvement to content editors and localizers worldwide. You can read more about this gigantic project in Kadir’s summary blog post — or you can check it out live on the testing server: master.support.mozilla.com.

After a lot of thinking about the platform SUMO is using, you decided to make some key changes to it?

I think you’re referring to the decision to completely rewrite the SUMO platform. Yes, this has ended up being the major development focus of 2010, and the decision was based on the current state of the SUMO platform at the time. The list of wanted features and fixes was growing faster than our development team was able to keep up with, and the fact that Firefox was becoming so popular forced us to spend a lot of our time just patching things up while the website was slowly grinding to a halt. We simply had to do something radical if we wanted to ensure we could remain competitive and agile, so we decided to build something new from scratch. A more detailed summary of the history behind this decision can be found in a blog post from February this year. Today we’re finally beginning to see the fruit of our hard work over the year — and the result is Kitsune!

What would be the 3 most important new features of Kitsune?

There are so many improvements in our new SUMO web platform (internally more known as Kitsune), it’s really hard to rank them. Our amazing development team has really gone above and beyond, working around the clock to give us a support platform we can feel truly proud of. We already have a new support forum based on Kitsune that has been out in the wild for a few months now, so I’ll focus on the knowledge base here, since that’s our big focus right now. Here’s my personal top three list:

Third on my list is the new localization and editing interface that has been radically improved to streamline all common use cases — from editing an English support article, through reviewing an edit made by someone else, to translating an article into another language. Have a look at the typical contributor scenarios we’ve worked on improving. To say that we’ve spent a lot of thought about what goes into the platform would be an understatement… Special thanks to Chris, Michael and Kadir for their hard work in the critical design phase of the project.

On second place is the source code of the platform. This might not seem like a big deal at first, but it really is: the entire platform has been rewritten from scratch using the modern, python-based Django framework. What this means — aside from getting rid of countless of bugs and other issues that have plagued us for many years — is that we’ll be able to develop new features and fix bugs much faster than we’ve done in the past. Our SUMO development lead James Socol summarizes many of the benefits of the new platform in his recent blog post.

The most amazing new feature of Kitsune? Performance! The new Firefox Help website will be so much faster, both for users and contributors. In some places, Kitsune is almost 30x faster than the current website. It’s like we’ve gone from an old Wartburg to a brand new Koeningsegg! And we really needed it — with 400 million Firefox users and a thriving community of localizers around the world, timeouts and other weird behavior when editing support articles have become far too common on the website today. This will all be history when we release the new SUMO at the end of this month.

Where do you see SUMO in a 3 years period?

That’s an interesting question. I think there’s a lot of room for SUMO to grow way beyond our current size and reach. The recent Army of Awesome project has helped us reach out to more users in need of help, but there are still lots of Firefox users out there that aren’t aware of us — they simply don’t know that there’s an entire community of people ready to help if they have a problem with Firefox.

Three years from now, I believe that everyone who uses Firefox will know about its support site — and our community will be strong enough to help all of them. As for the support web platform we’re shipping this year, I can definitely see it turn into an open source support platform of choice for other projects like SeaMonkey and even non-Mozilla products. SUMO is already being used by Firefox (including mobile versions and Firefox Home) and Thunderbird, and this is just the beginning.

What message you’d like to send to people thinking about if they should join your team of contributors?

Please do! Helping Firefox users with their problems is simple, fun and only takes as much time as you’re willing to put into it. There are so many different ways to help — you can translate a support article into your language, which thousands of people will benefit from. Or you can help us improve the English articles. Or you can answer individual questions in the forum. Or you can interact with people directly using live chat, which is extremely addictive and rewarding. If you’re good vith video or image editing, you can help improve support articles by adding screencasts and screenshots. And if you think you don’t have enough time or lack the expertise needed to be helpful to others, we’ve got the solution for you. It doesn’t have to take more than a couple of minutes per day — and really, anyone can do it!

One last reminder: we’re just about to switch to a brand new knowledge base system. Please help us test the new stuff on master.support.mozilla.com so we can ensure a successful release at the end of this month! You can always ping us in the irc.mozilla.org channel #sumo, or post in our SUMO community forum if you have any questions. Welcome to the SUMO community!

Photo credits: Emil Stanchev

On the first day, we had a pretty productive internal meetings, discussing about almost everything related to promoting, metrics and communities in general. The best thing about it was that almost all sessions were interactive, so this is basically the only time and place we had in years to tell every thought of ours, to argue about this and that, and to hear other people’s opinions. Face to face confrontations while discussing ideas about various Mozilla projects made it several times more funny than we’re all used to. After all, we’ve came up with a set of goals for all communities, and hope that we can achieve at least portion of those, so we could gather up once more, and set some new goals.

Second day in Skopje, public day event, was a story all by itself. A lot of sessions in front of all of us, a lot of interesting questions for Mozilla Staff, and a lot of fun. We had sessions about Mozilla in general, localization, add-ons, drumbeat projects, development, etc. What I noticed about those sessions, is that everybody were all ears, swallowing every word out there. Although there were not as many attendants as we predicted at first, I’d say that those who attended this event, were more than enough to make this thing happen and feel the joy while presenting Mozilla’s mission and its projects.

As traditional rule on Mozilla events says, we needed to finish up this awesome gathering with `kafana`, just to made that weekend even better. Some of us were having fun, the others were having a lot of fun; I don’t actually remember anyone rejecting a glass of rakija. We’ve had some pretty girls, we’ve had a lot of handsome geeks (led by handsome camera guy), great band playing Macedonian/Serbian folk songs, and we also taught a few geeks how to play oro.

All in all, this meeting is something that, I’m sure, a lot of us will remember the whole life, and all of us are proud that we could be a part of such a nice crew.

Sure. I first started working for Mozilla back in 2006 when I was asked to start Mozilla’s Community Giving and Empowerment program. With the help of Asa Dotzler, I was able to launch a program to help members of our community with reasonable levels of support that would both assist and amplify a volunteer’s or a community’s contribution to the Mozilla project. Because so many of our community members had their beginnings in the localization work, I learned a great deal about localization and the needs of the community. It was clear that Mozilla should formalize even further the localization-drivers team to increase our focus on the global distribution of Mozilla applications and websites. Because I had much exposure to our volunteers, I was asked to help lead the l10n-drivers team.

Can you compare the importance of localization against some other parts of a complex projects like Firefox?

From a technical standpoint, someone could argue that localization is not as difficult as hacking on the Mozilla platform code or doing php web development, and they would be correct!  However, that is a bit like comparing apples to oranges because localization is incredibly important to the release engineering process at Mozilla.  If we were not able to localize our code, our global audience would not have as rich a user experience as they do now with a localized product.  Localization touches many parts of the release process along the way to final release, including the user interface, QA, and build.  Therefore, our localizers often have to wear many hats, understanding how to translate the language of the user interface, how to access nightly builds, how to read html and php code, and how to test the versions ready for release.

How do you see the localization in the future, in terms of a popularity among localizers and its complexity?

I think the localization of Mozilla products has gotten easier in the past two years, with more tools, reporting, and documentation available for localizers to use. I also believe that it will continue to get easier. But, the important fact here is not to eliminate choice. Our volunteers should be able to choose how they want to localize products and websites, whether using a “slick” webtool or using a more technical code editor. The point is that we should make hard things easy and let everyone experiment and participate as they choose.

Can you tell me, based on your experience, can we expect more and more localizers, and what do Mozilla do to attract new contributors and to promote using the localized builds of its applications?

We work very hard to continue to attract new localizers. This takes a combination of steps. The first step is to work with local communities to help build contributors. If a local community wants to actively build new contributors, we need to work with them to push that authority to them and to the edges to make sure they are empowered to do so. We are in the midst of planning one such event now with Mozilla’s “Inter-Balkan Meetup”. The second step is to build tools for better localization. This includes improvements to our infrastructure, documents, and tools for translation. New localizers do not always know exactly how our process works. So, we need to create a clear path for them to engage and learn how to contribute. With those two steps in combination, I think we will always be adding new community.

What does Mozilla do to improve the ease of translation for its localizers?

One very specific step we have taken is to implement tools like Verbatim. If a localizer visits http://localize.mozilla.org, he or she will see all the open web projects needing translation for various languages. This brings the work flow and avenue for participation to the localizer in a fairly understandable and clear way. Secondly, we try hard to furnish up-to-date statistics about the state of product and web localization through our dashboards. Localization communities can always see the status of various projects (including how many strings are needing translation and where they are located in the code base) by vising this URL: https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/ If we continue to enhance our tools and streamline our infrastructure to provide to our localizers the most timely information and statistics about work needing to be done, we will continue to make the process easier.

What message would you send to all potential localizers reading this?

Give localization a try!

• If you speak a particular language, check out what needs to be done at the Verbatim URL: http://localize.mozilla.org.
• Contact the locale leader for your language. You can see who the locale leaders are for various language teams here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams
• Email me if you have any questions. You can find my contact information at my blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth

We always look for new contributors and welcome anyone with any level of experience to participate.

1. Internal meet-up for Mozilla staff and community
2. Public event led by Mozilla staff and community
3. General wrap-up of ideas

As noted on the official wiki page of the event:

The aim of the event is to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other’s experience working on the Mozilla Project and improve collaboration in the future. All participants are asked to help each other define joint quarterly goals for the year.

This event will actually be a gathering of several Balkans’ Mozilla communities, including Macedonian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian and Slovenian community. For the most of the things, we owe a beer to Gorjan, leader of the Macedonian community, for all his efforts over this few, very busy weeks of planning, organizing… Also, this all wouldn’t happen without endless support from our beloved Mozilla friends, William and Seth, among others.

When talking about schedule, we all agreed that we’d need a whole week to present everything we’d like to, and we needed to decide which topics need most attention. Therefore, we decided to talk mostly about promoting communities and its development, a little bit about development and add-ons, and also a bit about Support and Drumbeat. After all, we all hope that this is not the last meeting on Balkans, so we left some other topics for next occasion.

Mozilla Balkans 2010

Because most of you guys reading this post will not be able to attend this, we’re going to film it all so we can watch it again later and share it with all interested in it. What is most important, we’re also going to provide a live video stream for all of you to watch it directly in real-time, and we’re going to try to make the quality as good as possible.

A few last words: I’d like to thank all of you guys (you know who I’m talking about) for making all this happen, and of course, a big hearth <3 goes to Mozilla and Mozilla Europe for promoting and investing in our community!

1. How good the Web can be and what’s its true potential
2. Internet that we’re now living in, proprietary and closed
3. Mozilla will change it, and with your help, it’s going to happen pretty soon

First of all, it’s really important to know what you want to achieve, and to truly believe in what you’re about to say to your friends or people you want to attract to Mozilla. The next major thing you have to think about is the current situation on Internet, in terms of a Free vs. Proprietary software and Open vs. Closed source. Of course that everyone prefers free over software that needs to be paid for before use, but I’d like to quote a Free Software Foundation page title, that says everything: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price”.

So, the Internet inhabitants that do not participate in any of the Free and Open Source communities, probably think that the Internet is just the way it is, and it changes as the time goes by, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Well, that assumption is VERY wrong, because we, the proud Mozilla contributors, among other contributors from other open source communities, are the true power of the Web, the ones that care about our future and doing our best to improve it. That means that we know how can Internet look like in a few years, what’s the true potential of it, and what can we do to change it to be even better.

Our virtual lives on the Web in its current state are not so bad, but that doesn’t mean that they’re awesome. There are a lot of things that are blocking the progress and we’re going to need to make people aware of them, of all its pro’s and con’s. Internet Explorer, as an pretty good example of how can a company control browser market share in the world, is a software that every second Internet users uses, and that’s not because it’s so good. It’s only because people are unaware of other options out there, and have no will to explore new possibilities offered to them. That’s pretty much discouraging contributors to keep on with their work.

##http://www.flickr.com/photos/lhirlimann/3982801433/##Most of the Mozilla team in Prague## (photo by ##http://www.flickr.com/photos/lhirlimann/##Ludovic Hirlimann##, used under CC-BY-NC license)

Fortunately, we’ve seen Firefox getting what it realy deserves, and we’re constantly working on to make it even better. More and more people are now using Thunderbird rather then the easiest option they have, Outlook Express, and that’s all because our awesome community which is promoting Mozilla products and technology. After that, there is another great thing Mozilla is doing to help spread awareness, and that’s offering the whole source code and a lot of documentation for developer, encouraging and educating people on how to use its platform for their projects.

So, as all of you reading this article can see, we’re almost there, we just a need a bit more work on it, and a little help promoting this, and we’re all going to enjoy the Free Internet. And what’s the best about it, it does not cost you anything, it does not take much time, and there’s a lot you can do about it. We’re a global community of contributors, and not all are Linux Guru’s nor are tremendous hackers. We all contribute as much as we can, and in a way we want to. Every help is appreciated! You can translate articles, do web or graphic design, helping with our user support, test our applications to improve quality, code add-ons, improve current code-base, or you can simply come and hang out.