Firefox Language Coverage | Hacking for Christ

Using some possibly plausible statistics, I’ve done a spreadsheet (OpenOffice Calc format) showing what percentage of the world Internet population we currently cover with Firefox localisations, and what percentage we’ll get when all the localisations listed here (i.e. the ones in mozilla.org CVS) are finished.

Headline numbers: we are currently at 88.3%, and we will get to 92.6% when we’ve finished Spanish (Spain), Dutch, Turkish and Slovak.

The missing big ones are (in order) Malay, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi and Farsi. We don’t seem to have as much impact in the far east… Getting all those would take us to 98.6%.

The middle four have at least had Firefox builds done before (see bottom of page), but the last Malay build of a mozilla.org product was Mozilla 1.0.1, and we’ve never had anything in Farsi. If you or anyone you know is interested in doing one of these languages, please contact the Mozilla Localisation Project staff.

I know Arabic, Thai, Hindi and Farsi are particularly complicated scripts – does anyone know if we fully support them yet?

14 thoughts on “Firefox Language Coverage”

This baby has been running for a couple of weeks now:
http://firefox.no/stats.html

Arabic should be working quite well, except text that uses combining diacritics, which have long standing bug.

Thai is not easy, and I don’t believe Mozilla has ever made much to support it.

They are some problem with Hindi (devenagari), but special builds should enable to overcome them all.

I seem to recall you did a similar survey to this in the past but also included IE’s numbers. Do you happen to still have that number around?

There’s a post in the Firefox builds Forum asking about how to do a localization so he could start the Persian (Farsi) one. Maybe contact him

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=172261&sid=f855fbf45615c97788d88eab934d9f8b

There’s a page about Arabic here:
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Mozilla

Looks like someone is working on a non-official Arabic localisation of Firefox 1.0.

That page also has a link to a bugzilla list of problems with support for Arabic and RTL languages.

Well I dont know about Linux builds. But, in windows world Hindi and other Indic languages are not properly supported. There rendering is totally faulty.

I remember someone saying that support is as good as windows platform. But, I had seen in XP that even though indic fonts are rendered correctly on IE it is not the case with FF.

Praveen

Hindi certainly doesn’t work correctly using the Debian GNU/Linux package of 1.0. I have had some success with CTL builds in the past, but this sort of thing needs to just work without the user doing anything.

Well I came across a screenshot it is Telugu(South Indian Language) rendered in FF in Fedora 2. Here it is:
http://people.ucsc.edu/~skurapat/pub/iiimf/Screenshot-Mozilla%20Firefox.png

It is rendered perfectly. But, I dont know how the guy achieved it. But, as an update I have tried again in Windows 2000 but, it doesnt render properly but, hey it doesnt render in IE too :(.

Stuart: here’s my older post.

Wikipedia’s list of languages by total speakers (which, admittedly, is total speakers rather than computer users) lists a bunch of prominent languages that aren’t in the list you point to. The one among those with the most speakers is Bengali.

Regarding our Indic script support on various platforms, Hindi wikipedia’s page on browsers is informative.

Also, most internet users in India tend to use English, so there’s not that much demand for browsers in Hindi or other Indian languages

Praveen,

Firefox renders Hindi properly on Windows XP. I have been using it for long. It may be you do not have proper font installed.

However, it does nto still work on Linux even with Pango.

hi praveen,
What was the firefox version you used for in that screenshot. My firefox is not able to render the telugu fonts correctly. Here is my screenshot http://uvramana.spymac.net/Screenshot-Firefox.png

regards,
ramana.

after setting MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 I can see telugu font rendered clearly in my firefox. Thank you for maintaining such a good webpage. (http://people.ucsc.edu/~skurapat/)

Vidar Braut Haarr on November 30, 2004 at 5:31 PM said:

This baby has been running for a couple of weeks now:
http://firefox.no/stats.html
jmdesp on November 30, 2004 at 6:51 PM said:

Arabic should be working quite well, except text that uses combining diacritics, which have long standing bug.

Thai is not easy, and I don’t believe Mozilla has ever made much to support it.

They are some problem with Hindi (devenagari), but special builds should enable to overcome them all.
Stuart Ballard on November 30, 2004 at 6:58 PM said:

I seem to recall you did a similar survey to this in the past but also included IE’s numbers. Do you happen to still have that number around?
Navid Azizi on November 30, 2004 at 7:08 PM said:

There’s a post in the Firefox builds Forum asking about how to do a localization so he could start the Persian (Farsi) one. Maybe contact him

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=172261&sid=f855fbf45615c97788d88eab934d9f8b
michaell on November 30, 2004 at 11:08 PM said:

There’s a page about Arabic here:
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Mozilla

Looks like someone is working on a non-official Arabic localisation of Firefox 1.0.

That page also has a link to a bugzilla list of problems with support for Arabic and RTL languages.
Praveen on December 1, 2004 at 2:38 AM said:

Well I dont know about Linux builds. But, in windows world Hindi and other Indic languages are not properly supported. There rendering is totally faulty.

I remember someone saying that support is as good as windows platform. But, I had seen in XP that even though indic fonts are rendered correctly on IE it is not the case with FF.

Praveen
Jamie on December 1, 2004 at 5:21 AM said:

Hindi certainly doesn’t work correctly using the Debian GNU/Linux package of 1.0. I have had some success with CTL builds in the past, but this sort of thing needs to just work without the user doing anything.
Praveen on December 1, 2004 at 9:24 AM said:

Well I came across a screenshot it is Telugu(South Indian Language) rendered in FF in Fedora 2. Here it is:
http://people.ucsc.edu/~skurapat/pub/iiimf/Screenshot-Mozilla%20Firefox.png

It is rendered perfectly. But, I dont know how the guy achieved it. But, as an update I have tried again in Windows 2000 but, it doesnt render properly but, hey it doesnt render in IE too :(.
Gerv on December 1, 2004 at 10:16 AM said:

Stuart: here’s my older post.
David Baron on December 4, 2004 at 10:08 PM said:

Wikipedia’s list of languages by total speakers (which, admittedly, is total speakers rather than computer users) lists a bunch of prominent languages that aren’t in the list you point to. The one among those with the most speakers is Bengali.

Regarding our Indic script support on various platforms, Hindi wikipedia’s page on browsers is informative.
Shashi Mohan on December 9, 2004 at 4:10 AM said:

Also, most internet users in India tend to use English, so there’s not that much demand for browsers in Hindi or other Indian languages
Raj Saini on December 13, 2004 at 2:57 AM said:

Praveen,

Firefox renders Hindi properly on Windows XP. I have been using it for long. It may be you do not have proper font installed.

However, it does nto still work on Linux even with Pango.
ramana on December 13, 2004 at 8:28 AM said:

hi praveen,
What was the firefox version you used for in that screenshot. My firefox is not able to render the telugu fonts correctly. Here is my screenshot http://uvramana.spymac.net/Screenshot-Firefox.png

regards,
ramana.
ramana on December 13, 2004 at 10:53 AM said:

after setting MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 I can see telugu font rendered clearly in my firefox. Thank you for maintaining such a good webpage. (http://people.ucsc.edu/~skurapat/)