Horv.at

BrowserID is an innovative approach to identity developed at Mozilla. Users are currently insecure, because they use a separate login for each site, but often use the same password. Systems such as Facebook Connect try to address this issue, but they leak private information about visited sites back to Facebook. So BrowserID is here to save the World.

But how can it save the whole World, if it’s only available in English? Well, not anymore. In less than three weeks, our volunteer localizers have translated BrowserID to 29 locales (English included)! This is more than Firefox 1.0 was available in, which clearly shows the importance of BrowserID inside Mozilla community.

BrowserID is the first project I’m driving localization for and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome so far.

So how does BrowserID work?

When you create a BrowserID account, you’re sent a verification email that lets BrowserID know that you really own that email address. Then when you use BrowserID to log into a website, the website is given your email address and told that you really do own it but they are never given your BrowserID password.

What are the benefits of using BrowserID?

• You can use one easy-to-remember log in for all sites that support BrowserID.
• You never have to trust a website with your password because they never know it.
• Your password can’t be stolen if one of those websites gets hacked.
• BrowserID doesn’t track your activity on the websites you visit (privacy policy).

I’m sold, can I give it a try?

• Mozilla Developer Network
• Mozilla Apps Developer Preview
• Mozilla Add-On Builder
• Firefox Affiliates
• Pontoon

You can now finally save translations you make with Pontoon. As of today, three different download formats are supported:

• HTML
• JSON
• PO (gettext)

I’ve temporarily disbled BrowserID login, which will be available again after we finish the migration to Mozilla server infrastructure.

I had a pleasure to spend the last weekend with bunch of smart people in Zagreb. Mozilla community in the country where Nikola Tesla was born is very young and ambitious, so they decided to start planning their activities for this year with a two-day community meeting.

Croats also wanted to learn from other communities about their activities, marketing projects, events, localization efforts etc., so they also invited Ioana from Romania, Oskar from Serbia and Brian and me from Slovenia.

With most of the members only joining the Croatian community last year, Brian and me tried to provide them with deeper understanding of Mozilla mission and our plans for the future. We presented various opportunities for contribution Mozilla offers. Check out our slides.

Being a localization driver, I also spoke about the importance of localization, what do we localize, where can people find documentation, what tools do we use and of course I couldn’t avoid demoing Pontoon.

Looking back, I can say I’ve spent two wonderful days in Zagreb, I’ve met a lot of clever people and I’ve got many interesting questions from them. But none of this would have happened without Nikola, this time Matosović (not Tesla).

This guy is a true Mozillian, who not only revived Mozilla community in Croatia with dozens of members joining in a couple of months, but also proved to be a superb event organiser. Many thanks to him personally and to his team for all the effort they are making!

On my way home I got caught by a police radar. But that could not even partly ruin my general impression, that Croatian community has a great potential for spreading the idea of open web all the way from Čakovec to Hvar.

This photo was taken on 1 December 2011

This photo was taken on 31 December 2011

Long story short: NSID is one hell of an experience. Highly recommended! Also, check mart3ll’s impressive series of NSID mugshots.

I believe we all find it pretty hard to talk about Mozilla, our mission and what we care about. Especially when not talking to web developers. It’s easy to say we create Firefox, of course, but our goals our much broader.

Almost a month ago I delivered a talk at »Information Society and Information Technologies« conference in Dolenjske Toplice. It was mostly about Mozilla, what we do and why getting involved matters to everyone, so you might be interested in my slides. Thanks Nino for translation to English.

Pontoon now makes it easier to localize websites with more than one page, i.e. almost all websites. Whenever you click on a link on the website you are localizing, Pontoon interface will update with strings that correspond to the newly loaded site.

It’s even easier if Pontoon operates in aided mode using hooks. In that case the new menu shows up with all subpages of the projects.

I spent last weekend in Berlin at the MozCamp Europe, which was one hell of a Mozilla event. My talk on localizing websites with Pontoon was well received and I got plenty of feedback.

Christian Heilmann delivered a talk on BrowserID, which is an easier way to sign in without giving away your identity or using password. It’s really easy to use for both, visitors of your websites and developers – go check it out!

As of today, you can log in to Pontoon using BrowserID.

Update: read more about BrowserID.

Firefox users can access web forgery report tool through Help menu. It’s a web service, hosted by Google, but it looks very outdated:

There are several aspects of the existing web forgery reporter that should be changed:

• Old Firefox logo is used.
• Website is neither pretty not Mozilla-style.
• Phishing link should be updated to the one it redirects to.
• AFAIK this is the only non-localizable site linked from Firefox.

Here‘s my proposal for the new design:

Diff:

• The new Firefox logo is used.
• Design is based on Firefox brand toolkit.
• It resembles Firefox Input (shall we just integrate reporter?).
• Phishing link is updated.
• It should be hosted on Mozilla servers (localizable).

Thoughts? There’s Bugzilla for that!
Hackers? There’s GitHub for that!

I’m currently working on the back-end functionality of Pontoon, written in Django. It provides API necessary for the client, user authentication, accepts partial and full translations of the document, presents information on the current status of the document’s translation, and synchronizes work between multiple localizers. As stated previously, it covers most of the work that has to be done before releasing Pontoon to public.

If you see any other showstoppers, let us know! Quickly!

We are also in the process of setting up Pontoon stage environment on Mozilla’s server infrastructure. I’d like to thank the Webdev gang and I’m really excited to meet them at the forthcoming All Hands.

Besides our own server, we are also preparing bindings for Pootle and Transifex, so users will be able to use Pontoon together with these tools. Imagine that you’ll translate most of the strings that appear on the website in-place, using Pontoon, but the rest will be finalized via Verbatim (Pootle). How cool is that?

Oh, and by the way, Pontoon now provides translation memory support, which is collected from all Mozilla product localizations. Give it a try!

Update: As Philippe from the French Mozilla community points out in the comments, transvision webservice is now available and it can do most of the job. Solution to the problem described below is now a one-line fix, but there are still many other features, where you can join Pontoon development.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, main development momentum for Pontoon will now continue on the back-end. One of the remaining items left to be implemented mostly on the front-end is translation memory support, briefly outlined on the Feature Brainstorming wiki.

For every entity on the website, we would like to provide matching translations from translation memory, similarly to how we already offer suggestions from other users, translations from other locales and machine translations.

There’s already room for translation memory hits in the interface, so what has to be done is:

1. If user asks for translation memory suggestion for the first time in session, make AJAX request to get the translation memory file for the user’s locale.
2. Search the original string in translation memory and provide 100% matches. Support for all matches above certain (50%?) percent is a plus.
3. Present matches in the UI and enable user to copy them to translation.

Translation memory files are made available in the XML standard TMX file format by the amazing French Mozilla community. They contain translations from all Mozilla-related products. For the initial implementation, before our Django back-end is made available, TMX files can be copied to the Pontoon repository and requested from client.

We are looking for geeks to implement translation memory support in Pontoon. Interested? Drop us a line in the comments or find us on Twitter and IRC.