Firefox L10n Report – Aurora 51

Here’s an outline of what is currently in Aurora this cycle for Firefox 51.

Current Aurora Cycle – Firefox 51

Key dates for this cycle:

• Beta (50): localization updates for already shipping locales must be completed before 19 October. Note that this cycle doesn’t follow the usual pattern.
• Aurora (51): localization updates must be completed before 7 November. That’s the Monday, also known as merge day, before the next release of Firefox.

String breakdown:

• Firefox Aurora desktop has 158 added strings (213 obsolete). About 55% of the new strings are for Developer Tools.
• Fennec Aurora has 27 new strings (17 obsolete). 8 new strings are Fennec-only (in /mobile).

There are currently no pending requests to uplift patches with strings to Aurora.

For further details on the new features you can check the release notes (they’re usually published a few days after release):

• Desktop: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/51.0a2/auroranotes/
• Android: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/51.0a2/auroranotes/

Noteworthy Changes Available in Aurora

These are some of the interesting changes introduced in the last cycle.

Dom

One string in layout/xmlparser.properties has changed without a new ID, from ‘no element found’ to ‘no root element found’.

Devtools

Several developer tools are moving strings from .DTD to .properties, it should be expected to have a perfect match in TM tools like Pontoon & Pootle between old and new strings. For example:

• Animator Inspector: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/662270014cb7
• Performance Tool: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-aurora/rev/0a038b4dc136

There is also one big movement of strings (from each devtools to a startup.properties file) to improve devtools startup performances.

The new debugger, also known as debugger.html, is currently not localizable. We’re in touch with the team and we hope to make it localizable soon.

Toolkit

In bug 1290756 and bug 686168, help viewer files were moved from toolkit to comm-central (for SeaMonkey). These files were either removed or moved into /suite for all locales during merge day.

Common Issues

GenericImageNameGIF = image.gif
GenericImageNameJPEG = image.jpg
GenericImageNamePNG = image.png

As the localization notes explain, you should not localize the extension, but you should localize the ‘image’ part.

New Languages

When Firefox 51 moves to release, if everything goes according to plans, we aim to release 3 new locales on desktop:

• Georgian (ka)
• Kabyle (kab)
• Latgalian (ltg)

Congratulation to all the teams involved: localizing Firefox is a huge effort and achievement!

We have 4 other locales with a promising outline, and we really look forward to release them in the next versions of Firefox:

• Burmese (my)
• Nepali (ne-NP)
• Tagalog (tl)
• Urdu (ur)

If you want to know more about the process of releasing new locales, or if you speak one of these languages and want to know how to help the localization teams, please get in touch with us.

To all localizers: Thanks again for all the time and effort you put in localizing and promoting Firefox in your language.