Carnet de notes

Voilà c'est fait, 3.0.8 est sorti et corrige aussi une faille rendue publique et documentée par un italien il y a deux jours. Les mises à jour automatiques pour nos 62 langues sur 3 OS sont en activité et les sites web sont à jour.

Téléchargement via Mozilla Europe ou via le mécanisme de mise à jour automatique (menu ?/Rechercher des mises à jour)

Tristan a écrit un billet sur la Sécurité des navigateurs et nous dit ceci:

Soit. Je vous propose donc une petite expérience... Dès que Firefox 3.0.8 est sorti, je déclenche le chrono pour voir combien de temps il faut à Microsoft pour corriger leur problème, qui a été trouvé en même temps que celui de Firefox. On va bien voir ce qu'ils entendent par "extrêmement rapide", chez Microsoft. Je me demande si ça sera corrigé lundi ou mardi. Ou le mois prochain. Ou l'année prochaine... Et puis on va voir combien de temps les gens prennent pour le mettre à jour.

As every year, Mozilla is going to be at Fosdem with a booth and our own conference room where you will be able to meet with the people behind the different branches of the Mozilla tree (Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Europe, Community members and other European Mozilla related associations...).

Lots of fun ahead, lots of interesting talks and a great opportunity to chat or have a drink with the people that make Firefox, Thunderbird, Fennec, Sunbird and all the amazing software based on the Mozilla platform.

It is also a great opportunity to get involved in the Mozilla community, and particularly in helping us translating and promoting Firefox in Europe!!

We have lots of things to do for the upcoming releases of Firefox 3.1 and Thunderbird 3.0, especially on the web pages front where we definitely need volunteers for all of the languages we support.

We also need more people getting involved in helping our local community websites grow and do more things like publishing news items, helping in forums, going to local open source events, organizing parties...

If you want to get involved in localization, promote Mozilla in your language or even get into Quality Assurance and make sure Mozilla products get even better with time... Really, don't hesitate and come to our booth or talk to us in the Fosdem corridors.

Have a great Fosdem 2009!!!

Mozilla Hispano acaba de anunciar la primera versión pública de su extensión Tuentifox 0.1 beta

Esta extensión ofrece a los usuarios de la red social para jóvenes españoles Tuenti un panel lateral que les permitirá interactuar con los servicios de Tuenti (cambiar su estatuto, enviar mensajes, subir fotos, ver qué amigos están conectados...) sin tener la página de Tuenti abierta.

La genesis de esta nueva extensión tiene rasgos muy interesantes tanto a nivel de Mozilla Hispano, como del proyecto Mozilla en general. En efecto, se inició este proyecto cuando hicimos un taller de creación de extensiones en Madrid el mes pasado con mi compañero de trabajo Paul Rouget. El amigo Juantomás García también había hecho un resumen detallado del evento: Resumen Workshop extensiones de firefox.

Este taller (que llamamos MAOW para Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop) era el segundo después del de París de una serie de encuentros que estamos organizando por toda Europa (el próximo taller será en Berlín en marzo). Habíamos decidido adaptar el contenido al mercado español creando la base de una extensión para Tuenti en directo y proponiendo a los que asistieron al evento recuperar el código y seguir el desarrollo.

Los chicos de Mozilla Hispano (y en particular Nukeador) decidieron tomar las cosas en serio y lanzar el desarrollo comunitario de la extensión a través de sus foros, ¡¡todo un éxito!!

Al final hemos aprendido muchas cosas de este experimento:

• Basar el taller en un proyecto concreto y adaptado al mercado local era una buena idea para motivar un público con pocos conocimientos de las tecnologías mozilla. Cosa que no habíamos hecho en Francia porqué ya tenemos allí una comunidad fuerte de desarrolladores XUL con sus propios proyectos.
• Continuar el proyecto a través de los foros de Mozilla Hispano era una excelente idea, primero porque nos da una herramienta de medida del éxito del taller, y segundo porque fortalece nuestra comunidad española.
• Colaborar con Libresoft de la universidad rey Juan Carlos para organizar la logística del taller era también una buena idea

Dentro de un par de semanas estaremos todos en FOSDEM y podremos hablar todos juntos de cómo se organizó la creación de Tuentifox. En particular, estaría interesante ver si este modelo de desarrollo es reproductible en otros paises Europeos y si podría fomentar la creación de una comunidad local de desarrolladores de extensiones para Mozilla.

7 Things You May (Or May Not) Know About Me

It eventually had to happen, I have been tagged by Stas so here is a few dirty little secrets about me :)

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things:

1. I was a bee-keeper when I was a kid, with two hives in the garden. My record production was 20 kilos of honey (not great but I was just a kid ;) ).
2. Before working professionnally for Mozilla I was running an office furniture business that I created in 2001 and was working with my little sister. She is now running the family business but I still give a hand for paperwork and everything computers.
3. 2001 is also the year when I started my involvement in the Mozilla project, helping people in forums, being a nightly build tester and later doing community Tech Evangelism. That's how I met Tristan on Usenet, he was working for Netscape Europe Tech Evang team.
4. I spent a semester in Wolverhampton as an ERASMUS student in 1995. It was one of the greatest periods of my life and I met amazing people. Some of these people have become close friends and I actually am going to have dinner with one of them tonight :)
5. I spent a year working as a hall monitor in a ghetto school, this was an alternative to military service (yes, I am old enough to have known the last years of conscription in France :) ) and this was an interesting experience, especially since I have always been interested in education.
6. I worked several years as a part-time translator during my studies for a company called Linguatech localizing software for companies like Microsoft or IBM. Few people know it, but I was part of the team that translated the help files for IE 4!
7. To validate my master's degree in international business, I spent 7 months in Alcatel's competitive intelligence department working on quantitative analysis and building a small intranet. Professionnally I learned a lot from this experience, in large parts thanks to my mentor Alain Pradelle.

Ok, now my victims :) :

• Juantomás García, famous Spanish open source hacker. Because he is a great guy and he helps Mozilla a lot with his contacts in the Spanish market. He is also an incredible source of funny stories!
• Fabien Cazenave, AKA Kazé, the guy behind KompoZer. Because he has a blog that should be syndicated on planet but isn't :)
• Nukeador, our relentless Spanish web localizer :)
• Henrik Skupin our German Web localizer and now part of Mozilla QA team
• Axel Hecht fellow Mozilla Europe board member, fellow l10n-driver and rum baba lover !
• Delphine Lebédel who just joined the European Mozilla team to help on community events and other community related tasks, I know you have already been tagged by Stas so you can't escape!
• and finally Kalman Kemenczy our Hungarian localizer who does not blog in English but maybe this could make him change his mind ;)

Les grandes boîtes ont les repas d'entreprise de noël, nous on a les soirées bières au Hall's Beer ! ;)

Les fans de mozilla ont donc rendez-vous au Hall's Beer Tavern ce lundi à partir de 19h pour prendre une bière

Notre stagiaire Sonny l'a d'ailleurs déjà annoncé avec tous les détails logistiques :

Lundi: soirée Mozilla, détente et bière à Paris

Vu sur TF1, un gars avec un Tshirt et des badges Firefox qui fait un sketch, il s'agit de Monsieur Dream:

Vous pouvez retrouver cette vidéo sur son blog : Monsieur Dream

Ce week end, plein de mozilliens seront présents à l'Ubuntu party de Paris organisée à la cité des sciences de la Villette.

Nous auront notre propre salle d'activités, il y aura des ateliers, Delphine a promis de nous préparer des gâteaux et on fera des démos de plein de trucs marrants faits avec Mozilla.

C'est gratuit, c'est marrant, vous rencontrerez aussi des gens de l'April (une bonne occasion pour adhérer à l'assoce et aider le libre) et vous verrez les gens qui font Firefox dans la vraie vie, allez un échantillon de contributeurs Mozilla ci-dessous ! :

(photo prise au Mozilla Camp Barcelone)

As you may have learned recently on Seth's blog, we have been working lately on creating translated landing pages on mozilla.com for all of the locales that are not already supported on an official regional portal (that is those not on Mozilla Europe/China/Japan).

Now that I have a bit of time I can blog a bit about how this project is going.

We have created this week landing pages on mozilla.com for 7 of our locales (Afrikaans, Frisian, Irish, Indonesian, Georgian, Slovene, Swedish) which is a good start given that we (Laura and me) plan to have all of the 37 locales we are targeting done by the end of the year. By the way, the list of targeted locales is on the Web Dashboard, if your language is on the list of languages we are targeting, don't hesitate to come and help with the translation!

So what does it change for let's say a Slovene user compared to the previous situation? Until one week ago, a user with Internet Explorer in Slovene going to getfirefox.com or mozilla.com was redirected to mozilla.com/en-US/ and was offered a link to download Firefox in Slovene but the page was all written in English. This is good enough for people speaking English as a second language, but our target audience is no longer the computer and English savvy advanced users. We were certainly losing potential users for one of these reasons:

• The user gets to an English page and concludes that Firefox is not localized into his language.
• The user just doesn't understand what the page is about and leaves.
• We misdetect the visitor's locale and he downloads Firefox in the wrong language.

It is very clear to me that translating a whole portal like mozilla.com and keeping it up to date is not scalable. Maintaining a reduced version of a portal like we do on Mozilla Europe for 22 languages is already a very big task and could be seen as an ideal solution, but many of the locales we are speaking about have little human resources to keep and, more importantly, maintain an entire web site.

Another drawback of a multilingual portal is that any technical change in the reference language (English) may have an impact on localized pages. This is particularily true for stylesheet changes, I have already seen minor visual fixes on an English page impacting negatively the same page for other languages. So as to avoid that, updates on the English version have to be very carefully done and planned and lots of QA of localized pages has to be done when some files are updated in English. Definitely, this is not scalable or would be possible for a handful of languages only.

The solution chosen is one single landing page to propose the download of Firefox, give a few informations (among which a link to the locale's community portal) and also a link to Thunderbird pages in English. We have a separate stylesheet for that and we only share a cut-down version of the mozilla.com template. Our Hebrew localizer is also working on a Right-To-Left stylesheet, thanks Tomer for that!

Additionally, offering the right locale in a page written into the right language is not the only good news about it. This is also going to help promoting localized versions of Firefox more easily with a short url such as www.mozilla.com/af for Afrikaans. Great for printed material, banners or simply to give the url of the site verbally to a friend. This will also allow us to do real Search Engine Optimization in the user's language (as we did in the past on mozilla-europe.org) and one of the next things to do will be to evaluate the wording of this page for better result, I'll open bugs about it and we will work with our communities on optimizing the language for better search results. By the way, these pages are in Google results since this morning, which is a good start :)

One other good news is that we promote on this page community portals, which means that this will give more visibility to these portals and hopefully new contributors will join the Mozilla project.

Here is the list of current languages done (in the visitor's language so as to give it a small SEO boost ;) ):

• Firefox in Swedish / Firefox på svenska
• Firefox in Indonesian / Dapatkan Firefox Bahasa Indonesia
• Firefox in Irish / Firefox as Gaeilge
• Firefox in Georgian / Firefox ბრაუზერი ქართულად
• Firefox in Slovene / Firefox v slovenščini
• Firefox in Frisian / Firefox yn it Frysk
• Firefox in Afrikaans / Firefox in Afrikaans

UPDATE:

One more locale done today, Galician:

• Firefox in Galician / Firefox en Galego