Treacle tarts for great justice
موزيلا فايرفوكس حمّص / Mozilla Firefox hummus / מוזילה פיירפוקס חומוס
I made this hummus, and my wife seasoned it in the shape of the Mozilla Firefox logo.
I’d like to use this opportunity to remind that Mozilla is not just a good web browser with a cute logo, but also a non-profit community of people who love the web and who work to keep the web free, open, standard and accessible to all.
Kim Jong Il died.
Then a humorous blog called “kim jong-il looking at things” surged in popularity.
I looked at it, too, and found it funny.
And then i looked at its about section and became sad. Its about section said: “for a more beautiful experience use google chrome or safari. font-face seems to have an issue with firefox and will display a very bland arial instead of the exquisite amaranth.” Someone reading this may think that it’s a bug in Firefox, but as a matter of fact, Firefox is the browser that implements font-face correctly according to the CSS standard.
This Kim Jong Il blog is hosted on tumblr.com – a nice and stylish blog service. Among other services, tumblr gives its gives users an option to use web fonts to improve the appearance of their blogs. tumblr’s developers probably only tested this feature with Chrome and Safari and when it didn’t work on Firefox nobody cared – after all, as nice as it is, it’s just another English font.
tumblr.com has the same issue that Wikipedias in Indic languages had after we installed WebFonts there – it tries to load the font files from a different server, but Firefox, according to the standard, doesn’t load the font from a different domain if that domain is not explicitly configured to support font loading. We in Wikimedia fixed it immediately after finding it, because using web fonts for us is a way to make our website readable. For tumblr, as for most other English websites, using web fonts is just a way to make the website a little more beautiful.
tumblr.com should fix this bug. I reported this font problem at getsatisfaction.com, hoping that tumblr developers would notice it. It hasn’t been done yet, even though it’s a one-line fix.
tumblr webmasters! If you happen to read this post – please fix this issue. Thank you.
In December the Localization team of the Wikimedia Foundation, of which i am a proud member, deployed the support for web fonts in Wikipedias in several languages of India. Put simply, this technology allows anyone with reasonably modern web browser to read Wikipedia in an exotic language without manually installing exotic fonts on his computer. Tom Morris wrote a very nice blog post that explain why web fonts matter: Web fonts were invented for making web sites niftier, but they are useful for something much more important beyond aesthetics and design – to enable people to read and write in any language effortlessly. People need to be able to read and write effortlessly using a computer, but this notion is so basic that it is frequently overlooked.
Basically, web fonts turn this:
◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌, ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌.◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌, ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌.
into this:
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field.
Without webfonts, a person who speaks a language that is not written in Latin letters has two choices when seeing “◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌”: to install fonts manually or to try to find that information in English or some other language that is written in Latin. Two frequently ignored facts: 1. most people don’t know how to install fonts on their computers; 2. most people don’t know English.
Web fonts make text readable without any effort from the user. Wikipedia is probably the first major website that uses web fonts for the really important purpose of allowing people to read websites in their language. This post here will highlight some technical details about the deployment.
A spoiler: Firefox rulez.
Microsoft Internet Explorer, not surprisingly, has the most issues with web fonts support. For example, it sometimes shows complete gibberish instead of the actual letters. The situation is especially bad on Windows XP; Windows XP is an old system, but it matters, because lots of people in India and in many other countries still use it – about 17% of Wikipedia’s readers use Internet Explorer on Windows XP. Even though Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 seems to handle web fonts decently, it cannot be installed on Windows XP, so it’s irrelevant to hundreds of millions of people. My advice to them – get Firefox.
Opera sucks here and there, too. For example, on a Mac, Opera may fail to show English (!) words, because it tries to show them in an Indic font, and if an Indic font doesn’t have Latin characters, the display is broken. Google Chrome has similar problems, too.
In Firefox we found practically no issues with web fonts support. The only problem with Firefox that happened during the deployment of WebFonts is that Firefox didn’t load the fonts at all, but actually that happened because Firefox implements the web fonts standard correctly. On our testing site the font files were loaded from the same server as the web page itself, while on the actual Wikipedia the font files are loaded from a different domain to improve performance. The web fonts standard says that by default a browser is not supposed to load fonts from a different domain, unless that domain explicitly allows this. Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer override this standard and load the fonts and Firefox doesn’t. When we noticed it, we asked Wikimedia’s web server administrators to change the configuration to explicitly allow the loading of fonts. Wikimedia’s web server configuration files are open, so you’re welcome to read them by clicking the link.
I didn’t make any precise measurements, but from my personal experience Firefox has much less issues with support for Unicode, complex fonts and right-to-left text than any other browser. It surely does have issues, but my impression is that Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera have much more of them.
We reported the font issues that we found in Google Chrome to its developers and we hope that they will be fixed. We also tried to report issues in Opera and Internet Explorer; since there’s no public bug tracking systems for these browsers, we cannot track their development.
I hardly ever used Google Chrome because of a bug that made the Ctrl-arrow keyboard shortcut work incorrectly in right-to-left languages. This shortcut works makes the cursor jump a word to the left or to the right. In Hebrew and Arabic it would jump to the left when the right arrow was be pressed. It works well in most other programs, but since Chrome doesn’t use the operating system’s text editing capabilities, this worked incorrectly.
I write a lot of email, blog posts and Wikipedia articles and this keyboard shortcut is essential for me, so if it doesn’t work correctly in a program, i simply cannot use it and will use the competitor, in my case Firefox. Since i love Firefox anyway, it was not really a problem for me.
It took more than two years to do it, but this bug is more or less solved now and the fix will probably be released soon. I am now trying a preliminary version and the Ctrl-arrow shortcut seems to work correctly. However, as i expected, i quickly found other problems because of which i cannot use Google Chrome. Long story short, i cannot write Russian there. It’s not that it’s impossible – it’s just way too hard for me.
I could enable the Russian keyboard layout in my operating system, but it would be very hard to use for me. Keyboards sold in my country usually come with Latin and Hebrew letters printed on the keys and not Russian. It’s possible to buy a keyboard with Russian letters on it, and i did it once, but it didn’t help me much. You see, i write Russian several times a day, but less often than i write Hebrew or English, and the Russian layout is very different from the Latin layout, so i type in it very slowly even if i have the letters in front of my eyes.
Since 2006 my solution for this issue was the Transliterator add-on for Firefox, created by Alex Benenson (thank you so much, Alex). It was first called “ToCyrillic”, because it only helped with the Cyrillic alphabet, but later it was adapted to many other languages. It allows me to type Russian phonetically, so the Latin ‘b’ is automatically converted to Cyrillic ‘б’, ‘sh’ becomes ‘ш’ etc. It works everywhere in Firefox – websites’ input fields, the address bar, the dialog windows etc.
I couldn’t find anything like it for Chrome. It’s possible that i didn’t look well enough, but the add-ons i did find that claimed to do transliteration, phonetic typing or keyboard emulation either did something completely different or asked me to allow the add-on access my data on all websites and my tabs and browsing activity. I don’t understand why such an add-on would need access to my data and browsing activity – it is only supposed to translate the characters i type into other characters and forget it.
It’s possible that the message that tells me about these privacy implications is over-zealous and the add-ons in question don’t actually breach my privacy, but it is still weird to see them, so i didn’t install them.
So there – i still have a strong reason not to move to Google Chrome. It’s not really Google’s fault. In fact, i could myself develop an extension that does something that i want – the source and the API are open and it’s probably not a lot of work. But why would i waste even a minute of my time doing such a thing if i already have Firefox and its Transliterator add-on that work perfectly well? You could say that Google Chrome is faster and uses less memory; it is not quite true in the first place, and even if it would be true, i wouldn’t care about it, because being able to write the language i want is far more important than minor differences in performance.
As a side note, in some Google websites it’s possible to type in transliteration. However, it works only on these particular sites and needs the machine to be online, because it uses a web service to translate every word. That is weird software design and has rather unacceptable privacy implications.
Wikipedia already has phonetic typing support in Malayalam, Tamil and other languages and soon it is going to be deployed to other languages. It works in-place – it translates the text immediately in the browser letter by letter. Of course, it only works in one website; it would be better to help people to enable their native keyboard layouts rather than do it in only one website, but apparently doing it this way helps people start writing and searching immediately. More details on that soon.
One especially awesome project i learned about at MozCamp Berlin is Hackasaurus. (Big thanks to Alina for convincing me to attend the talk about it.)
The Hackasaurus mascot
Hackasaurus is a set of software tools and workflows to teach young people web programming. Its technical centerpiece, the “X-Ray Goggles”, is a tool that works similarly to Firebug and Google Chrome Developer tools: it helps the user examine and change, or “remix”, the inner workings of a web page – the structure of HTML elements and CSS styles. It has less features than the above tools, but it is designed to have just enough to get average people started with understanding web technologies. It is also laughably easy to install: it’s not even an add-on – you only need to add a bookmark.
According to the Hackasaurus creators Jess Klein and Atul Varma, even though the tool was intended for children, it is being used for learning about web technologies by people of all ages who were curious about web development, but found other HTML tutorials too hard.
And it works not just in Firefox, but in other browsers, too. That is one more example of how the Mozilla movement is not just about Firefox, but about Loving the web.
Hackasaurus can be easily translated to other languages using Pootle. I already translated most of it to Hebrew. Special thanks to Atul for creating the page dev.hksr.us which is frequently updated with the translations in progress – it is essential for testing the localized version. For example, i can see that the right-to-left directionality of Hackasaurus in Hebrew must still be fixed – i hope to find the time to do it myself as soon as possible.
And most importantly, i am thinking of using the tool to start teaching web development in a fun way in the schools in my area. This has been done successfully in Barcelona, New York, Brighton, Nairobi and other places and i plan to add Jerusalem and Haifa to this list soon.
Except the general topic of Loving the Web, there was another important topic present in almost every time slot of MozCamp Berlin 2011, a topic that interest me more than anything else in software: localization. I attended most of the localization talks and gave one myself.
MozCamp Berlin 2011 WorldReady
And i gave a talk that compares the localization of Mozilla and MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The slides are here. Many people who attended it said that it was bold of me to say these rather negative things about Mozilla. It is somewhat true – it is quite bold of me to use the first major Mozilla event i attend as a bully pulpit to promote my other project, but the talk was generally well-received. I believe that i succeeded at making my point: Both Mozilla and MediaWiki are leaders in the world of massively localized Free Software and both projects have things to learn from each other – Mozilla can simplify its translation workflow and consider converging its currently sprawling tools and procedures, as it is in MediaWiki, and MediaWiki can learn a lot from Mozilla about building the localization teams as communities of people and about quality control.
Finally, i was very glad to meet Dwayne Bailey and Alexandru Szasz – developers of Pootle and Narro, two localization tools used in the Mozilla world. Talking to them was very interesting and inspiring – they both understand well the importance of localization and the shortcomings of the current tools, including the ones that they are developing, and they are keen on fixing them. As a result of this excellent meeting i completed the translation of Pootle itself into Hebrew. And there is more to come.
On November 12–13 i participated in MozCamp Berlin. (I’m writing this late-ish, because a day after that i went to India to participate in a Wikimedia conference and not one, but two hackathons. That was a crazy month.)
In the past i participated in small events of the Israeli Mozilla community, but this was my first major Mozilla-centric event.
MozCamp Berlin 2011 group photo. Notice the fox on the left and yours truly on the right.
The biggest thing that i take from this event is the understanding that i belong to this community of people who love the web. I never properly realized it earlier; i somehow thought that loving the web is a given. It is not.
Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox Engineering repeated the phrase “we <3 the web” several times in his keynote speech. And this is the thing that makes the Mozilla community special.
Firefox is not the only good web browser. Opera and Google Chrome are reasonably good, too. Frankly, they are even better than Firefox in some features, though i find them less essential.
Firefox is not the only web browser that strives to implement web standards. Opera, Google Chrome and even recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer try to do that, too.
Firefox is not even the only web browser that is Free Software. So is Chromium.
But Firefox and the Mozilla community around it love the web. I don’t really have a solid way to explain it – it’s mostly a feeling. And with other browsers i just don’t have it. They help people surf the web, but they aren’t in the business of loving it.
And this is important, because the Internet is not just a piece of technical infrastructure that helps people communicate, do business and find information and entertainment. The Internet is a culture in itself – worthy of appreciation in itself and worthy of love in itself – and the Mozilla community is there to make it happen.
Some people would understand from this that Firefox is for the nerds who care about the technology more than they care about going out every once in a while. It isn’t. It’s not, in fact, just about a browser. It’s about the web – more and more Mozilla is not just developing a great browser, but also technologies and trends that affect all users of all browsers, rather than target markets. By using Firefox you get as close as you can to the cutting edge, not just of cool new features, but of openness and equality. Some people may find this ideology boring and pointless; i find it important, because without it the Internet would not be where it is today. Imagine an Internet in which the main sites you visit every day are not Facebook, Wikipedia, Google and your favorite blogs, but msn.com… and nothing but msn.com. Without Mozilla that’s how the Internet would probably look today. Without Mozilla something like this may well happen in the future.
Thanks a lot to William Quiviger, Pierros Papadeas, Greg Jost and all the other hard-working people who produced this great event.
More about it in the next couple of posts very soon.
Wikimania in Haifa was great. Plenty of people wrote blog posts about it; the world doesn’t need a yet another post about how great it was.
What the world does need is more blog posts about the great ideas that grew in the little hallway conversations there. One of the things that i discussed with many people at Wikimania is what i call The Software Localization Paradox. That’s an idea that has been bothering me for about a year. I tried to look for other people who wrote about it online and couldn’t find anything.
Like any other translation, software localization is best done by people who know well both the original language in which the software interface was written – usually English, and the target language. People who don’t know English strongly prefer to use software in a language they know. If the software is not available in their language, they will either not use it at all or will have to memorize lots of otherwise meaningless English strings and locations of buttons. People who do know English often prefer to use software in English even if it is available in their native language. The two most frequent explanations for that is that the translation is bad and that people who want to use computers should learn English anyway. The problem is that for various reasons lots of people will never learn English even if it would be mandatory in schools and useful for business. They will have to suffer the bad translations and will have no way to fix it.
I’ve been talking to people at Wikimania about this, especially people from India. (I also spoke to people from Thailand, Russia, Greece and other countries, but Indians were the biggest group.) All of them knew English and at least one language of India. The larger group of Indian Wikipedians to whom i spoke preferred English for most communication, especially online, even if they had computers and mobile phones that supported Indian languages; some of them even preferred to speak English at home with their families. They also preferred reading and writing articles in the English Wikipedia. The second, smaller, group preferred the local language. Most of these people also happened to be working on localizing software, such as MediaWiki and Firefox.
So this is the paradox – to fix localization bugs, someone must notice them, and to notice them, more people who know English must use localized software, but people who know English rarely use localized software. That’s why lately i’ve been evangelizing about it. Even people who know English well should use software in their language – not to boost their national pride, but to help the people who speak that language and don’t know English. They should use the software especially if it’s translated badly, because they are the only ones who can report bugs in the translation or fix the bugs themselves.
(A side note: Needless to say, Free Software is much more convenient for localization, because proprietary software companies are usually too hard to even approach about this matter; they only pay translators if they have a reason to believe that it will increase sales. This is another often overlooked advantage of Free Software.)
I am glad to say that i convinced most people to whom i spoke about it at Wikimania to at least try to use Firefox in their native language and taught them where to report bugs about it. I also challenged them to write at least one article in the Wikipedia in their own language, such as Hindi, Telugu or Kannada – as useful as the English Wikipedia is to the world, Telugu Wikipedia is much more useful for people who speak Telugu, but no English. I already saw some results.
I am now looking for ideas and verifiable data to develop this concept further. What are the best strategies to convince people that they should use localized software? For example: How economically viable is software localization? What is cheaper for an education department of a country – to translate software for schools or to teach all the students English? Or: How does the absence of localized software affect different geographical areas in Africa, India, the Middle East?
Any ideas about this are very welcome.
A Slashdot story says: “If you’re like a lot of Firefox 4 users out there, you’ve probably noticed that Firefox has a serious memory problem — it uses more than it really should.”
No, i didn’t. I am what people would call a “power user” of web browsers, and i didn’t notice any memory problems in Firefox. At least not any memory problems that caused any other problems that i would notice. I have no reason to measure the memory usage of an application if it doesn’t have any other problems. Let it use whatever it wants as long as it functions properly otherwise.
And, thank God, there are a lot of Firefox users who are much less advanced than i am, and they certainly don’t give a damn about memory usage.
So no, this claim about “a lot of Firefox users” noticing serious memory problems is just plain wrong.
(Ahem, yes, i still read Slashdot.)
Mozilla Firefox comes in many localized versions for many different languages, which is a good thing.
Mozilla Firefox has built-in spell-checking, which is also a good thing.
So, for example, if you download the installer for English (US) or for Lithuanian and install it and go write an email in GMail or edit a Wikipedia article in one of these languages, you’ll immediately see your spelling errors. This makes perfect sense.
But if you download an installer localized for English (UK), Catalan or Hebrew, you won’t see your spelling errors. The Firefox binary has spell-checking capabilities, but the installer doesn’t include the actual dictionary. Firefox-compatible dictionaries for these languages exist, and they are licensed as Free Software (GPL or LGPL), and you can add them manually after installing (right-click -> Languages -> Add Dictionaries), but here comes the ridiculous part: The guys behind getfirefox.com refuse to include those dictionaries in the installer. The reason, apparently, is that to be included in the installer, the dictionary must be 300% compatible with Firefox’s license, because Firefox is tri-licensed as GPL/LGPL/MPL, and a dictionary that is GPL-only is not good enough.
It is hard enough to convince people to install Firefox in the first place; convincing them to install additional dictionaries, plug-ins, add-ons etc. tends to frustrate them even more. Contrary to the belief which is popular among Firefox power users, most people are not add-on junkies and don’t right-click everywhere. So, even though Firefox users in London, Barcelona and Jerusalem can see Firefox menus in their respective languages, they have dead-weight spell-checking code on their hard drives, because they didn’t get a spelling dictionary in the installation, and many of them don’t even know that a Firefox-compatible spelling dictionary for their language exists.
Is this obnoxious licensing requirement really required? Isn’t Free Software licensing supposed to make distributing software easier?
When i told my wife Hadar about it, she said that it is as ridiculous as the stuff i tell her about DRM.
See also:
