Firefox Indic language usage is not growing rapidly

Firefox is providing insight into download and use of its language versions from Dec-2009. It uses a feature called blocklist, where in the Firefox browser contacts Mozilla servers for updates on the malware websitesm once a day. Through this transaction, Mozilla is able to track the usage of the locale of the browser.

I got access to few Indic language report s (Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, ,Tamil, Telugu) for the past 3 months and tried to analyze the same. In the chart below, the downloads for the week are shown in the chart. Hindi tops the list, among the languages I have analyzed, an expected statistic in view of the larger population.

However the actual usage for the week ending 2010-03-14 is shown below. There is not much change in the last few months in these numbers. Hindi again tops the list, but its proportion of users from outside India is very much low compared to all other languages . Malayalam has large percentage of users outside India relative to to other languages. Hindi users are about 0.1% of the total users from India for Firefox 3.6 Version. Other language percentages are much below. Though the download numbers every week are roughly the same, the usage has not improved much in the last three months. This means that users are curious to find out the language version looks like, but many are not really using it.

It would be interesting to speculate about the reasons. Many users could be using computers provided by their employer. They may not be comfortable with the localized version. Or they might have experienced font display issues, if their system is not configured for rendering the language. Any other guesses and suggestions on how we can convert the downloaders into actual users?
More detailed analysis for Telugu is available in Telugu blogpost entry.

Firefox indic session - A report

As Mozilla is sponsoring this barcamp, Firefox stickers were issued to all the participants when they registered for the day. I presented Firefox indic session at Barcampbangalore7 on 14 Sep 2008. There were just 3 people in the audience when the session started. It soon became 10 to 15 people. The presentation went on for exactly 45 minutes, in an interactive mode.

Couple of students from Amritha Institute of technology were keen to understand the status of Tamil localization of Firefox. After the session, I showed them the relevant Bugzilla bugs and suggested the next steps like contacting the lead localizer and using IRC for all their questions. Several people wanted to know about easy ways of contributing to localization. I pointed them to Narro
project. One guy wanted to know why we are doing this, as there are not many people using localized versions. I explained that this is a chicken and egg problem and we need the localization to break the barrier, which will result in a positive feedback loop, making the technology reach most school educated Indians, even if they do not know English.

Firefox indic localization session at Barcamp7

Barcampbangalore7, is scheduled for 13,14 September 2008. This is going to be my third barcamp. As is the norm in technology, by the third attempt, any product becomes successful or looses the race. So is any initiative. I thought I should start real contributions to the Barcamp.

I have been working on Firefox Telugu localization for over 9 months and went through a lot of learnings about contributing to the open source world, be it setting up wiki pages for project, creating email-lists or tracking fellow contributors and chasing the coordinators to increase the prirority for our initiative. The Telugu version of Firefox was to have released with Firefox 2.13, but is now likely to be available with firefox 3.0.2 beta . As several other Indian languages are also planned for release, I proposed a session in the upcoming barcamp on this topic.

I propose to cover the following

• Brief history of Firefox, Features of firefox,
• Localization tips
• Other initiatives to strengthen Indic localization.

I welcome other contributors to join me for this session.