Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama » Firefox

Always define the language and the direction of your HTML documents, part 02: Backwards English

aharoni — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:14:26 +0000

In part 01 of these series, I showed why is it important to always define the language and the direction of all HTML content and not rely on the defaults: The content may get embedded in a document with different direction and be displayed incorrectly.

This issue is laughably easy to avoid: If you are writing the content, you are supposed to know in what language it is written, so if it’s English, just write even though these seem to be the defaults. Nineteen or so characters that ensure your content is readable and not displayed backwards. Please do it always and tell all your friends to do it.

The problem is that you don’t only have to explicitly set the language and the direction, but, as silly as it sounds, you have to set them correctly, too. A more subtle, but nevertheless quite frequent and disruptive bug is displaying presumably, but not actually, translated content in a different direction. This happens quite frequently when a website supports the browser language detection feature, known as Accept-Language:

The web server sees that the browser requests content in Hebrew.
The web server sends a response with , but because the website is not actually translated, the text is shown in the fallback language, which is usually English.
The user sees the content just like this numbered list, which I intentionally set to dir=”rtl”: with the numbers and the punctuation on the wrong side, and possibly invisible, because English is not a right-to-left language.

Of course, it can go even worse. Arrows can point the wrong way and buttons and images can overlap and hide each other, rendering the page not just hard to read, but totally unusable.

This bug is also an example of the Software Localization Paradox: It manifests itself when Accept-Language is not English, but most developers install English operating systems and don’t bother to change the preferred language settings in the browser, so they never see how this bug manifests itself. The site developers don’t bother to test for it either.

The solution, of course, is to set a different language and direction only if the site is actually translated, and not to pretend that it’s translated if it’s not.

Here are two examples of such brokenness. Both sites are important and useful, but hard to use for people whose Accept-Language is Hebrew, Persian or Arabic.

Here’s how the Mozilla Developer Network website looks in fake Hebrew:

Mozilla Developer Network website, in English, but right-to-left

Notice how the full stops are on the left end and how the text overlaps the images in the tiles on the right-hand side. This is how it is supposed to look, more or less:

Mozilla Developer Network home page in English, left-to-right

I manually changed dir=”rtl” to dir=”ltr” using the element inspector from Firefox’s developer tools and I also had to tweak a CSS class to move the “mozilla” tab at the top.

The above troubles are reported as bug 816443 – lang and dir attributes must be used only if the page is actually translated.

After showing an example of a web development bug from a site for, ahem, web developers, here is an even funnier example: The home page of Unicode’s CLDR. That’s right: Unicode’s own website shows text with incorrect direction:

The Unicode CLDR website, in English but right-to-left

The only words translated here are “Contents” (תוכן) and “Search this site” (חיפוש באתר זה), which is not so useful. The rest is shown in English, and the direction is broken: Notice the strange alignment of the content and the schedule table. A few months ago that table was so broken that its content wasn’t visible at all, but that was probably patched.

Here’s how it is supposed to look:

The CLDR home page in English, appropriately left-to-right

I tried reporting the CLDR home page direction bug, but it was closed as “out-of-scope”: The CLDR developers say that the Google Sites infrastructure is to blame. This is frustrating, because as far as I know Google Sites doesn’t have a proper bug reporting system and all I can do is write a question about that direction problem in the Google Sites forum and hope that somebody notices it or poke my Googler friends.

One thing that I will not do is switch my Accept-Language to English. Whenever I can, I don’t just want to see the website correctly, but to try to help my neighbor: see the possible problems that can affect other users who use different language. Somebody has to break the Software Localization Paradox.

Filed under: Firefox, Free Software, localization

The Fateful March of 1998 – my #webstory

aharoni — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 10:06:53 +0000

I first connected to the web in the summer of 1997. I bought a new computer with Windows 95 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 2. For about a week I thought that that’s how the web is supposed to look, but I kept seeing messages saying “Your browser doesn’t support frames” on a lot of sites. And then I found that there’s this thing called Microsoft Internet Explorer 3. I went to microsoft.com and downloaded it. It was the first piece of software that I downloaded. It was about 10 megabytes and took about an hour on my dial-up connection.

Most notably, Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 supported frames and animated GIFs. I loved animated GIFs! I guess that it makes me quite a hipster.

House cat. Sorry, it’s an anachronism— this animated GIF is from mid-2000s. 1997′s animated GIFs were quite different.

And then Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 came out. I thought—”well, if the move from IE2 to IE3 made such a big difference, then I guess that I should try number 4, and it will be even cooler”. And I tried. And it was a disaster. The installation screwed up everything on my computer. I had no idea how to disable the dreaded Active Desktop, which it introduced. It didn’t work so well with my Hebrew version of Windows 95. So I did what a lot of people did very often back then and formatted my hard drive and re-installed Windows.

And the question arose—which browser should I use? IE3 was stable, but I didn’t like that it was getting old. So I went to netscape.com, to try that Netscape Navigator browser that I kept hearing everybody talking about it.

And I loved it.

I loved its nifty toolbars and its bookmarks manager. I loved the crash reporting; it crashed quite often, actually, but I didn’t feel so bad about it, because Microsoft’s programs crashed often, too, and in case of Netscape I felt good about reporting these crashes. Netscape’s email program, Netscape Messenger, was truly outstanding. I especially loved the green dot, which marked messages as read and unread in one click. Most of all, it said very clearly something that I came to realize only years later: “I am a program that lets you browse the web as well as possible. I am not trying to do anything else.”

Fast forward to March 1998. Netscape made the big announcement that the development of its browser becomes an open source project code-named “Mozilla”. I started hearing about “open source”, “free software” and Linux shortly before that, but it was mostly in the context of crazy geek hobbyists. And then suddenly a big famous end-user product that I love becomes open source—that felt really cool.

I followed Mozilla news since then. I heard about Bugzilla before its first version was released. I liked Mozilla’s decision to redo the whole rendering based on standards, even though many people criticized it. The thing that annoyed me the most in Mozilla’s early years was the lack of support for proper right-to-left text support, which was present in Internet Explorer. That’s why I, sadly, used mostly IE, and even became a bit of an IE power user. But I waited eagerly for Mozilla to do it and tried every alpha release.

The famous New York Times ad.

I was thrilled about the announcement of Firefox, the first stable version of Mozilla’s browser. I gave 10$ to the famous 2004 New York Times Firefox advertisement, and I still have the poster of that advertisement at home.

And there’s my name. Third line in the middle.

It always seemed natural to me that I follow Mozilla news so eagerly. I thought that everybody does it. I mean, how is it even possible to use the web in any way without being at least a bit curious about the technology that runs it?

And then in 2008 I wrote a little unimportant post in my Hebrew blog about a funny spelling correction. Tomer Cohen commented on it and suggested me to try the Hebrew spelling dictionary and Hebrew Firefox in general. And that’s how my big love story with software localization began.

I started sending corrections to the translation of Firefox’s interface translation. I started sending corrections to the Hebrew spelling dictionary. I got so curious about the way the spelling dictionary was built that I ended up doing a whole university degree in Hebrew Language. Really.

And in 2011 I started working in the Language Engineering team in the Wikimedia Foundation. I love it, and it probably wouldn’t have happened without my involvement with Mozilla. In the same year I also became a Mozilla Rep—a volunteer representative of Mozilla at conferences, blogs and forums.

Probably the most important thing that I learned from my Mozilla story is that loving the web and being curious about it is not something obvious. Most people just want something that works for checking weather, news, Facebook friends updates, homework help and kitten videos. And for the most part, that is perfectly fine. But the people’s freedom to read reliable and complete news on any electronic device cannot actually be taken for granted. Neither the people’s freedom and privacy to share their thoughts in social networks. Mozilla is among the most important organizations that care for these things and it develops technologies that make them possible. Technologies that let you browse the web as well as possible and don’t try to do anything else.

We do it for one simple reason: We love the web.

Do you love it, too?

P.S. As I began writing this post, I realized that Microsoft’s Active Desktop was not so different from today’s devices, which are heavily based on web technologies: Firefox OS, Chrome OS and others. I can’t say that I love Microsoft, but as it often happens, it was quite pioneering with ideas, and not so good with their execution. Credit where credit’s due.

Filed under: Firefox, Free Software, Internet, privacy, software

English typing computer

aharoni — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 14:03:04 +0000

I’m in an Internet cafe in Mumbai. I tried to install Firefox with the Marathi interface, but on the computers here fonts for languages of India are not installed. That’s right – on computers in India fonts for languages of India are not installed. Hence, installing Firefox in Marathi failed at the very first stage, because the fonts are needed for the installation wizard.

Actually, I’m not surprised that these fonts are not installed, because it’s not my first time in India. I know that it happens a lot in this country. I would install them, but I don’t have a permission.

I find it incredibly weird – and tragic – that so many people in India don’t even try to use computers in any language except English. The one curious thing that I did find was an “English typing computer” shop. It’s just a place where you can use a computer to write Word documents in Hindi or Marathi, but using an English-based transliteration keyboard rather than the standard Indian Devanagari InScript keyboard, because they find transliteration keyboards easier. Of course, they could just install such a keyboard layout on their computers… but they prefer to go to an “English typing computer” shop.

We, software internationalization people, have so much more work to do.

Filed under: English, Firefox, India, localization, translation

Always define the language and the direction of your HTML documents, part 01

aharoni — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:42:49 +0000

I received this email from Safari Books Online:

Email in English from Safari Books, oriented like Hebrew. Click to enlarge.

The email is written in English, but notice how the text is aligned unusually to the right. Notice also that the punctuation marks appear at the wrong end of the sentence. I used Firefox developer tools to apply the correct direction, and saw it correctly:

The same email, with corrected left-to-right formatting using Firefox developer tools

This happens because I use GMail with the Hebrew interface. GMail has to guess the direction of the emails that I receive, because in plain text there’s no easy way to specify the direction (I hope to discuss it in a separate post soon). Usually GMail guesses correctly. Ironically, for HTML-formatted emails like this one, GMail often guesses incorrectly, even though in HTML, unlike in plain text, it’s quite easy to specify the direction by simply adding dir=”ltr” to the root element of the email.

Unfortunately a lot of HTML authors don’t bother to specify explicit direction. Many are not even aware of this exotic dir attribute. Others think that because “ltr” is the default, they don’t have to specify it. They are wrong: As this email shows, the left-to-right HTML content is embedded in a right-to-left environment, and the “rtl” definition propagates to the embedded content.

You could blame GMail, of course, but it’s much more practical to always define the direction of your HTML content, even if it’s the default. You can never know where will your content end up.

P.S.: I read this post before publishing and suddenly realized that its style is quite similar to “Best Practices” books, such as Damian Conway’s classic “Perl Best Practices” – it tells you to do something that is not obviously needed, and explains why it is needed nevertheless. I like to acknowledge sources of inspiration. Thank you, Damian.

Filed under: Firefox, Internet, localization, Perl, programming, translation Tagged: right to left

The Secret Spell – how to easily make spelling checkers better

aharoni — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:30:23 +0000

Software localization and language tools are poorly understood by a lot of people in general. Probably the most misunderstood language tool, despite its ubiquity, is spell checking.

Here are some things that most people probably do understand about spelling checkers:

Using a spelling checker does not guarantee perfect grammar and correctness of the text. False positives and false negatives happen.
Spelling checkers don’t include all possible words – they don’t have names, rare technical terms, neologisms, etc.

And here are some facts about spelling checkers that people often don’t understand. Some of them are are so basic that they seem ridiculous, but nevertheless i heard them more than once:

Spelling checkers can exist for any language, not just for English.
At least in some programs it is possible to check the spelling of several languages at once, in one document.
Some spelling checkers intentionally omit some words, because they are too rare to be useful.
The same list of words can be used in several programs.
Contrariwise, the same language can have several lists of words available.

But probably the biggest misunderstanding about spelling checkers is that they are software just like any other: It was created by programmers, it has maintainers, and it has bugs. These bugs can be reported and fixed. This is relatively easy to do with Free Software like Firefox and LibreOffice, because proprietary software vendors usually don’t accept bug reports at all. But in fact, even with Free Software it is easy only in theory.

The problem with spelling checkers is that almost any person can easily find lots of missing words in them just by writing email and Facebook updates (and dare i mention, Wikipedia articles). It’s a problem, because there’s no easy way to report them. When the spell checker marks a legitimate word in red, the user can press “Add to dictionary”. This function adds the word to a local file, so it’s useful only for that user on that computer. It’s not even shared with that user’s other computers or mobile devices, and it’s certainly not shared with other people who speak that language and for whom that word can be useful.

The user can report a missing word as a bug in the bug tracking system of the program that he uses to write the texts, the most common examples being Firefox and LibreOffice. Both of these projects use Bugzilla to track bugs. However, filling a whole Bugzilla report form just to report a missing word is way too hard and time-consuming for most users, so they won’t do it. And even if they would do it, it would be hard for the maintainers of Firefox and LibreOffice to handle that bug report, because the spelling dictionaries are usually maintained by other people.

Now what if reporting a missing word to the spelling dictionary maintainers would be as easy as pressing “Add to dictionary”?

The answer is very simple – spelling dictionaries for many languages would quickly start to grow and improve. This is an area that just begs to be crowd-sourced. Sure, big, important and well-supported languages like English, French, Russian, Spanish and German may not really need it, because they have huge dictionaries already. But the benefit for languages without good software support would be enormous. I’m mostly talking about languages of Africa, India, the Pacific and Native American languages, too.

There’s not much to do on the client side: Just let “Add to dictionary” send the information to a server instead of saving it locally. Anonymous reporting should probably be the default, but there can be an option to attach an email address to the report and get the response of the maintainer. The more interesting question is what to do on the server side. Well, that’s not too complicated, either.

When the word arrives, the maintainer is notified and must do something about it. I can think of these possible resolutions:

The word is added to the dictionary and distributed to all users in the next released version.
The word is an inflected form of an existing word that the dictionary didn’t recognize because of a bug in the inflection logic. The bug is fixed and the fix is distributed to all users in the next released version.
The word is correct, but not added to the dictionary which is distributed to general users, because it’s deemed too rare to be useful for most people. It is, however, added to the dictionary for the benefit of linguists and other people who need complete dictionaries. Personal names that aren’t common enough to be included in the dictionary can receive similar treatment.
The word is not added to the dictionary, because it’s in the wrong language, but it can be forwarded to the maintainer of the spelling dictionary for that language. (The same can be done for a different spelling standard in the same language, like color/colour in English.)
The word is not added to the dictionary, because it’s a common misspelling (like “attendence” would be in English.)
The word is not added to the dictionary, because it’s complete gibberish.

Some of the points above can be identified semi-automatically, but the ultimate decision should be up to the dictionary maintainer. Mistakes that are reported too often – again, “attendence” may become one – can be filtered out automatically. The IP addresses of abusive users who send too much garbage can be blocked.

The same system for maintaining spelling dictionaries can be used for all languages and reside on the same website. This would be similar to translatewiki.net – one website in which all the translations for MediaWiki and related projects are handled. It makes sense on translatewiki.net, because the translation requirements for all languages are pretty much the same and the translators help each other. The requirements for spelling dictionaries are also mostly the same for all languages, even though they differ in the implementation of morphology and in other features, so developers of dictionaries for different languages can collaborate.

I already started implementing a web service for doing this. I called it Orthoman – “orthography manager”. I picked Perl and Catalyst for this – Perl is the language that i know best and i heard that Catalyst is a good framework for writing web services. I never wrote a web service from scratch before, so i’m slowish and this “implementation” doesn’t do anything useful yet. If you have a different suggestion for me – Ruby, Python, whatever -, you are welcome to propose it to me. If you are a web service implementation genius and can implement the thing i described here in two hours, feel free to do it in any language.

Filed under: bugs, Firefox, Free Software, LibreOffice, linguistics, localization, Perl, Wikipedia

Mongol Bichig, or why Microsoft Internet Explorer is better than Firefox, Chrome and Opera

aharoni — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:17:05 +0000

After writing this post I found out that Google Chrome, in fact, does support vertical Mongolian text.

The title of this post is designed to catch the eye. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not better than Firefox, Chrome and Opera – it’s worse than them in every imaginable regard.

Except one: the support for Mongol Bichig, the vertical Mongolian script.

Text in vertical Mongolian

Mongolian script is unique: its letters are connected, similarly to Arabic and its lines are written vertically. About three million Mongols in the independent republic of Mongolia use this script mostly for historical purposes, and use the Cyrillic script in their daily life, but the classical vertical script is the regular script for nearly six million Mongols in China – that’s about twice as much people.

The only browser that is able to display the vertical Mongolian script is Microsoft Internet Explorer. I don’t really know why Microsoft bothered to do it; maybe because the government of the People’s Republic of China demanded it. If that is true, then i salute the government of the People’s Republic of China. And i definitely salute Microsoft. I don’t like Microsoft’s insistence on keeping their code proprietary, but pioneering the support for this script, or any other, is praiseworthy.

I am very sad that at this time i cannot recommend my Mongolian friends to use my favorite browser, Firefox, or other modern browsers such as Google Chrome and Opera. For all their modernity, speed, feature richness and standards compliance, they are useless to over six million people who want to read and write in the vertical Mongolian script. At most, these browsers can display the script horizontally and with some letters incorrectly rendered. This also means that the only useful operating system for these people is Microsoft Windows.

One explanation that i heard for not supporting the vertical Mongolian script is that the CSS writing modes standard is not completely defined. This is actually a good and even noble reason, but when the most basic ability to read a language is in question, experimental support is better than no support.

So, which modern free browser will be the first to support the Mongolian script? I guess that it will be Firefox, given its excellent track record in supporting Unicode, and that Google Chrome will follow it after three years or so. But if Chrome developers surprise me and get there first, i’ll be just as happy. In any case, i am waiting impatiently, along with more than six million Mongols.

* * *

A completely unrelated postscript, intentionally hidden here, feel free to stop reading now: This morning i woke up to find that my Planet Mozilla feed was filled with reactions to a post by Gervaise Markham a.k.a. Gerv, in which he advocated keeping marriage defined as a union between a man and a woman, essentially opposing gay marriage. A lot of people were angry that anti-gay comments appear in a Mozilla-related feed and a lot of people were angry that anything off-topic appears there. Some people supported Gerv in different ways.

Gerv is a very well-known and very talented Mozilla programmer, and also a devout Christian. His blog is called “Hacking for Christ”. There’s nothing weird or wrong about it – there are many other excellent Christian hackers, like Perl’s Larry Wall and Jonathan Worthington and Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew. Gerv’s comment wasn’t particularly hateful; as it often goes, it focused on the legal side of things. Gerv is also an unusually charming person; i had the pleasure to meet him in Berlin.

All that said, i support gay marriage, i don’t support Gerv’s comment and i think that he shouldn’t have post it that way. But once he did, hey – water under the bridge. I care much more about his contributions to Mozilla’s code than about his social, legal and religious opinions.

And the loveliest part of it all is that in one the many comments to his post, i found a link to the play “8″, about the fight for recognizing gay marriage in California. On one hand, it’s a very well played PR stunt, with the highest league stars such as like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Martin Sheen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Bacon, Yeardley Smith, John C. Reilly and George Takei. On the other hand, it’s actually worth watching. If this is what came out of that poorly placed blog post, then i’m not complaining.

Filed under: family, Firefox, Free Software, gay, Google, language, localization, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Windows, religion, writing Tagged: Brad Pitt, China, George Clooney, George Takei, Google Chrome, Jamie Lee Curtis, John C. Reilly, Kevin Bacon, Martin Sheen, Mongolian, Yeardley Smith

Traditions I can trace: Wikipedia and Firefox in the Library

aharoni — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:36:04 +0000

Liron Dorfman, a Wikimedia Israel activist, periodically lectures in a library in the north of the country, helping librarians contribute their vast knowledge and experience with reference works to the Free Encyclopedia.

At one of these lectures he called me in panic and asked for urgent help: He was trying to teach the librarians how to upload images to the Commons, Wikipedia’s images repository, and the Upload Wizard got stuck.

My first question, of course, was “Which browser are you using?”

The answer was, non-surprisingly, “Microsoft Internet Explorer”.

So i told him to try another browser. There wasn’t one installed, so i told him to download one. He wanted to download Chrome, but i insisted on Firefox, and he agreed.

So he installed Firefox, tried the Upload Wizard there, and it worked. Win.

It was a nice demonstration of how Firefox can save the day. It would probably work in Google Chrome, too; it has many bugs that make it almost unusable to me, but for this matter, Firefox was just a matter of personal preference.

Of course, uploading should work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, too; about 30% of Wikipedia readers still use it, and about half of them use the old Internet Explorer 8, which is the newest version available on the still-popular Windows XP. The fact, however, is that for better or worse MediaWiki developers mostly use GNU/Linux and Mac, on which Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn’t run at all, so we don’t even open it unless they have a reason. We usually test new features on it, but it is rare for us to actually use it for browsing the web, and that is essential for noticing bugs that would otherwise go unnoticed.

We all wish that all our users would stop using the old, proprietary and non-compliant Microsoft Internet Explorer, but we cannot convert millions of people overnight; even the giants Google and Facebook tried to do that and until now it was not a great success. Until then, we hope that the people who still use it will at least be able to read and contribute text and media. We can only fix problems if we know about them, so if you use Internet Explorer and encounter a problem in Wikipedia or the websites related to it, please report it at Wikimedia’s bug reporting site.

But if you just stop using Internet Explorer and move to a modern browser, we’ll be quite happy, too.

And to get back to the opening point – never be shy to introduce your friends who still use Microsoft Internet Explorer to Firefox! They’ll thank you in any case, but it works especially well when things break. If you find yourself doing that a lot, then you are already very cool and you should consider going further by becoming a Mozilla Rep.

Filed under: Firefox, Free Software, Wikipedia Tagged: libraries, standards

Firefox Aurora – Mozilla’s biggest breakthrough since Firefox itself

aharoni — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:26:10 +0000

This post encourages you to be a little more adventurous. Please try doing what it says, even if you don’t consider yourself a techie person.

The release of Firefox 4 in March 2011 brought many noticeable innovations in the browser itself, but there was another important innovation that was overlooked and misunderstood by many: A new procedure for testing and releasing new versions.

Before Firefox 4, the release schedule of the Firefox browser was inconsistent and versions were released “when they were ready”. Beta versions were released at rather random dates and quite frequently they were unstable. Nightly builds were appropriately called “Minefield” – they crashed so often that it was impossible to use them for daily web browsing activities.

The most significant breakthrough with regards to the testing of the Firefox browser came a year ago: Mozilla decided on a regular six-week release schedule and introduced the “release channels”: Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release. The “Release” version is what most people download and use. “Beta” could be called a “Release candidate” – few, if any, changes are made to it before it becomes “Release”. Both “Aurora” and “Nightly” are updated daily and the differences between them are that “Nightly” has more experimental features that come right from the developers’ laptops and that “Aurora” is usually released with translations to all the languages that Firefox supports, while “Nightly” is mostly released in English.

Now here’s the most important part: I use Aurora and Nightly most of the time and my own experience is that both of them are actually very stable and can be used for daily browsing. It’s possible to install all the versions side-by-side on one machine and to have them use the same add-ons, preferences, history and bookmarks. This makes it possible for many testers to fully use them for whatever they need the browser for in their life without going back to the stable version. There certainly are surprises and bugs in functionality, but i have yet to encounter one that would make me give up. In comparison, in the old “Minefield” builds the browser would often crash before a tester would even notice these bugs, so it not so useful for testing.

This change is huge. Looking back at the year of this release schedule, this may be the biggest breakthrough in the world of web browsers since the release of Firefox 1.0 in 2004. In case you forgot, before Firefox was called “Firefox”, it was just “Mozilla”; it was innovative, but too experimental for the casual user: it had clunky user interface and it couldn’t open many websites, which were built with only Microsoft Internet Explorer in mind. Consequently, it was frequently laughed at. “Firefox” was an effort to take the great innovative thing that Mozilla was, clean it up and make it functional, shiny, inviting and easy to install and use. That effort was an earth-shaking success, that revived competition and innovation in Internet technologies.

Aurora does to software testing what Firefox did to web browsing. It makes beta testing easy and fun for many people – it turns testing from a bug hunting game that only nerds want to play into a fun and unobtrusive thing that anybody can do without even noticing. And it is a yet another thing that the Mozilla Foundation does to make the web better for everybody, with everybody’s participation.

A few words about Mozilla’s competitors: The Google Chrome team does something similar with what they call “Canary builds”. I use them to peek into the future of Chrome and i occasionally report bugs in them, but i find them much less stable than Firefox Nightly, so they aren’t as game-changing. Just as Minefield from Mozilla’s distant past, they crash too often to be useful as a daily web browser, so i keep going back to Firefox Aurora. Microsoft releases new versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer very rarely and installing future test versions is way too hard for most people, so it’s not even in the game. Opera is in the middle: It releases new versions of its browser quite frequently and offers beta builds for downloading, but it doesn’t have a public bug tracking system, so i cannot really participate in the development process.

To sum things up: Download Firefox Aurora and start using it as your daily browser and report bugs if you find any. You’ll see that it’s easier than you thought to make the Web better.

Filed under: Firefox, Free Software, Google, Microsoft, software Tagged: testing

Why Google Chrome Will Make the Web Worse Than Television

aharoni — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:06:23 +0000

I know very few people who still watch television.

Television is boring, pointless and hopelessly outdated. For some reason millions of people still watch it, but it’s a matter of time until the whole industry will crumble like the governments of the USSR and Libya did, and we shall wonder why did it take so long. It will be painful to some people who make their living from it, but it will happen.

The future of entertainment and broadcasting is shaping now, and the direction is not bad. With each version of the modern web browsers – Firefox, Chrome and Opera – embedding video into pages is getting easier and works better. Users are forced less and less to install proprietary and unstable plugins. Flash is becoming a thing of the past, with YouTube working without it just as well. Diverse people create excellent music and films in their homes and they are able to publish it instantly. Business models for getting people to pay for DRM-free video and music are improving, too, for everybody’s benefit.

For some reason, however, Google and Microsoft aren’t happy about these perfectly sensible developments. They are proposing to add DRM – Digital Restriction Management – to the HTML standard. This weird document says that “No ‘DRM’ is added to the HTML5 specification“, but a document that speaks about encrypting and “protecting” content is a document about DRM. This is not “protection”, but restriction, and it is defective by design.

Preventing the copying of music and video files is not actually important to Google or to the media production companies. They will find ways to charge money for music and video. They rather want to know who is listening to what, to know what to produce and to whom to sell it. Google is essentially an advertising company, and an advertising company’s biggest asset is demographic data about people’s tastes and customs.

This is a grave privacy concern, of course, but there are enough privacy geeks to write about that. I’m not much of a privacy geek; what i really care about for this matter is the future of culture. Culture has to be interesting, vibrant and constantly innovative. When advertisers and media providers know the tastes of the “consumers” too well, culture tends to repeat itself and become very bad. Much like television in the last few years.

It is highly unlikely that the W3C will accept this proposal and make it standard. W3C dislikes DRM to begin with, Mozilla representatives in the W3C will definitely oppose to it, and even Google’s own W3C representative isn’t enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine that Google will implement this proposal in Chrome, and Microsoft will implement it in Internet Explorer. Then they will set up several websites with “partners” who will provide “content” that cannot be played without this DRM scheme, and this will pull more people into using these browsers and lock them into a nightmare of pointless, recycled, creativity-stifling entertainment.

I am a Mozillian. You may think that this means that i want Firefox’s market share to be 100%. That is not what i want. I love the web and i want it to be great for all people, no matter which browser they use. Building Digital Restriction Management into browsers will make the web, and the whole culture around it, bad and boring.

Don’t let that happen to the web. If you care about culture and arts, use Firefox – a browser that is committed to openness and not to advertising revenue.

Filed under: DRM, Firefox, Free Software, Internet, marketing, Microsoft, Microsoft Internet Explorer Tagged: Google, Google Chrome, standards

Mozilla at the Israel Internet Society Conference 2012

aharoni — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 22:43:23 +0000

On Tuesday i attended the Israel Internet Society Conference 2012.

I spent most of my time at the Mozilla Israel booth – giving away buttons and stickers, and, more importantly, telling many people about Mozilla’s mission and about the importance of the open web. Our booth was one of the most popular attractions in the event’s hallways. (This is the right place to say a big Thank You to the Mozilla Creative Collective for designing the wonderful posters, buttons and all the other eye-catching stuff. You give Mozilla’s great principles and projects the beautiful and fun look that they deserve.)

Standing like that and telling person after person that Mozilla is not a commercial company and that it’s concerned with far more important things than Firefox’s market share is very satisfying and sobering.

Right-to-left: Elad Alfassa, Amir Aharoni, Tomer Cohen. Mozilla Israel is an open community, which is friendly to other open projects, so in addition to Mozilla Firefox swag, Elad gave out Fedora CDs and i gave out Wikipedia stickers.

We tried to give special attention to Mozilla’s mobile projects – first and foremost, the rewritten version of the mobile Firefox for Android, which is not yet complete, but getting there; we also got some people to install a preview version (Aurora) of the mobile browser. I’m happy to see that there are quite a lot of open-minded people who are willing to try another interesting browser, even though it’s not completely polished it and even though the default kinda works. Some people who expressed interest in education were very also impressed when i showed them that the Mobile Firefox, though still not being release-quality, is able to render Hebrew poetry very well – something that the built-in Webkit browser is not able to do.

The famous poem "Only About Myself" by Rachel, rendered correctly in Mobile Firefox.

The same poem, rendered incorrectly by the Mobile Webkit browser. That's the one that's just called "Browser" or "Internet" on your phone.

You see, you usually don’t need correct rendering of the special characters needed to display Hebrew poetry if you only use the web to write email and read news, but if you are a school student who wants to prepare the homework or a commuter who likes to read poetry on a train, you’ll be able to do it with Firefox, but not with Webkit (the Opera browser is broken in this regard, too). This is more than a small and unimportant feature that happens to work correctly; this is a demonstration of the fact that Mozilla developers think that it’s important to support all languages, all scripts and all standards – for all people.

And of course there were all those people who said “Why should I bother with Firefox if Chrome is faster?”. It was very pleasant to tell them that the claim that Chrome is faster is mostly a myth, (although it required some mental preparation), but we emphasized that Chrome, though it’s a nice open source project, is mostly developed by an advertising company, which has particular requirements and focuses on particular goals, while Firefox focuses on standards and users. (I’ll publish a post that explains why the claim that Google Chrome is faster is a myth very soon.)

Firefox Home, the app for synchronizing desktop Firefox with iPhone, was a hit, too, and a few people installed it on their iPhones right at the booth.

This was a very satisfying day.

Right-to-left: Elad Alfassa, Tomer Cohen and the special guest Simon Montagu - one of the wizards who make exotic Unicode fonts and right-to-left text work in Firefox

Do you believe in Mozilla’s goal of open web, based on open standards and open to all people? Become a Mozilla Rep!

Filed under: Firefox, Internet, localization, marketing Tagged: Google Chrome