Interview with Blake Ross, by Matt Hall, February 2006

Blake Ross, co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, talked to us about his passion to bring internet access to people in all corners of the earth. Firefox is free to download (including source code), commercial-quality, featureful, and secure alternative to other browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. Part of Firefox's success stems from the way that its developers and localizers work together to create working versions of Firefox in over forty languages, a notable feat unmatched by any commercial software company.

HALL: Why are internationalization and localization support important to the Firefox project? How did the support come about?

ROSS: We started Firefox to make web browsing easy and painless for everybody, and this mission stretches across every country and every Internet-enabled device. We are currently able to offer the browser in over three dozen languages thanks to the tireless efforts of our volunteer localizers. Because Firefox is an open-source project built by the community, many of our volunteers are motivated to localize it into their own languages so they and their neighbors can enjoy a better experience. How many other projects offer you the chance to say "I delivered a product to 22 million Romanian citizens"?

HALL: How has Firefox catered to newly emerging markets such as China and India to get in on the ground floor of Internet adoption?

ROSS: We have an official Chinese affiliate (www.mozilla.org.cn) that oversees operations there and organizes local campaigns. We support our SpreadFirefox.com community of over 200,000 users worldwide with the evangelism tools and funding they need to spread Firefox in their neighborhoods. Many of these users are renowned professionals that influence the highest echelons of their regions. For example, in May 2005, the SpreadFirefox team was contacted by a fan with humble ambitions to spread Firefox in India. A few weeks later, these ambitions spawned a governmental effort to distribute Firefox CDs to over 3.5 million Tamil speakers.

HALL: When Firefox implemented internationalization and localization, did it involve primarily language-related issues or were there cultural issues as well?

ROSS: Linguistic issues are just the beginning; the project leaders, most of whom are based in the U.S., must constantly reevaluate their worldviews. For example, here in the U.S., Google is the undisputed king of search, and so it is woven throughout the Firefox interface. But many of our international users have never even heard of Google, so we try to pick the best local search engine in each regional edition. Another good example is the default bookmark set. Long before Firefox 1.0 was shipped, we had an offbeat set of defaults that included Amnesty International, which is blocked in China.

HALL: How can software be designed to best accomodate high-quality internationalization and localization features?

ROSS: Good developers will look at localization as another independent module and code accordingly. It's dangerous to translate this idiom to other domains, because this kind of rigid abstraction is endemic to software. For example, I wouldn't advise a company to build a language-neutral marketing campaign and then throw it over the wall to be localized, because the very messages behind the campaign could be offensive to another culture even if (perhaps especially if) translated perfectly. Likewise, Firefox localization consists of two independent processes: first the translation of the interface itself, and then the careful consideration of more subjective features, such as default bookmarks and search engines. In fact, this speaks to the most important issue of all: localization cannot be an afterthought. Users can tell when they're being treated as second-class citizens, and that's usually worse than if a company had never localized for them at all.

We enforce a strict localization deadline many weeks before a Firefox release to curb interface changes and afford our localizers plenty of translation time.

HALL: What could be done to advance the state of the art in internationalization and localization? Is there any work to be done by developers and end users to make it better?

ROSS: Our XUL development framework dramatically simplifies the localization process, and we expect to see other frameworks gravitate toward its design in the future. "XUL" stands for XML-based User interface Language.

Although most users have little reason to know or care, the entire Firefox interface is essentially one big webpage neatly organized into content, style and language components. In fact, because the interface is a website, you can load Firefox itself in Firefox. More importantly, because the interface is a website, our localizers never need to dive into the murky depths of C++ and other low-level development languages. This framework, leveraged by the grassroots fiber that permeates everything we do in Firefox, represents a great leap forward in software development and delivery. It's no longer a question of men in suits sitting debating whether the size of a market warrants the cost of localization. If there's even one passionate user who wants Firefox in his language, we can help him make that a reality. For example, we offer Asturian and Basque versions of our software. The world's largest software company, Microsoft, does not.

HALL: How should an open source internationalization and translation effort be organized or managed?

ROSS: Delegation is key. You can't hand off localization to a regional leader and then try to micromanage him or her. You need to find someone you trust and let him run with the ball, because there's nothing worse than secondguessing someone's knowledge of his own culture.

HALL: How should success of such an endeavour be measured?

ROSS: Everything we do in Firefox is ultimately measured by the satisfaction of our users.

Copyright 2005 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.