The (almost ;) forgotten pages

Billet

Time passes, online resources are created and, one day, you realize that some pages created years ago are still promoting Firefox 1.0 while we are almost at 2.0...

This is what happened to the Firefox Central pages for many languages hosted in the mozilla-world.org domain. In 2004 the idea was to create some minimum content online, with links into the default bookmarks, that presented the browser and the Mozilla project in all the languages we supported product-wise, particularly for the (then) smaller communities that didn't have any Mozilla-related resources in their language. These pages were created in a rush for the Firefox 1.0 release and hosted on Mozilla Europe's servers manually because it was the only multilingual official site.

Changes in the project, lack of a clear process to update these pages, lack of manpower, lack of a clear list of contributors to maintain these pages... Well, you know what I mean, we all have this section of your website that you are not particularly proud of because it's a mess and you know you should have fixed it a long time ago ;)

If you want to know what's to be done, wish to give a little help to the Mozilla project by helping us getting these pages updated and maintained, you can jump to my post to mozilla.dev.l10n.web here:

MAJOR UPDATE NEEDED - Firefox central pages

(of course, consult your local Mozilla community before, in particular the Firefox localizer(s), no need to duplicate work)

The good news is that now we have more human resources to handle localization, we have better structures and we are now able to work on our weak points and create a much brighter future for web content localization. Compared to what was available only 3 years ago, we have become a project with a very strong international focus. Not that many projects succeed in providing software and content to dozens of languages. Sometimes, some people ask us "Why do you support language X or Y?", the answer is simple, we chose not to put ourselves limits about languages, we chose to scale and structure the project to support as many languages a is humanly manageable, and not to scale the number of supported languages to the size of the current organization.