juillet 2009

Although I got into the mozilla project through en-user documentation and support around 2001, I really got involved in Web localization in 2003 when I started to build a Spanish Mozilla community around the Mozilla Suite and I convinced Bob Clary (who also gave me my canconfirm rights in bugzilla, thanks for that!) to publish a page in Spanish on mozilla.org so as to promote Tech Evangelism activities in Spanish.

That was the first non-English page on an official mozilla site ever and the funny thing is that... this page is still online!  ;)

We are now in July 2009 and we just shipped Firefox 3.5 in more than 70 languages, all with a set of in-product pages hosted on mozilla.com. But more than in-product pages, we now have with this release a localized home page on mozilla.com for ALL of our locales!

Now that the release is done and millions of users are downloading the best version of Firefox ever every day, I have some time to thank all of the people that have made such an achievement possible.

Thank you to our localizers first, without them, the Mozilla project would not have the international outreach it has and I really think that our localizers are way more than translators, they are involved in every corner of mozilla activities, from code, to marketing and documentation. It is a privilege for us to work with people having so many skills and passionate about FLOSS and the open web!

Thank you also to the rest of the l10n-drivers team (Seth, Axel, Stas, Gandalf...) and thank you to Delphine who did an awesome job with QA of all of the localized pages over the past weeks on our sites!

Happy international browsing :)

Pascal