Firefox In India

Seth Bindernagel, Arun Ranganathan

Some Uber Points

• Web Usage In India
• Localization
• Platform and Technology
  • What the President Said
  • Proprietary Technology Proliferates
  • foss.in/2007 and foss.in/2008

Landscape

• India has a population of greater than 1.1 billion people
• Second largest labor force (516.3 million people)
• Fourth largest economy (when measured in GDP at US$4.726 trillion)
• Estimated 70 million people are online
  • Nearly all of these people speak English
  • Government initiatives claim that ~98% of the country will be "wired" for Internet access by 2013
• 23 officially recognized languages in India
  • 1,652 dialects
  • Hindi is the official national language
  • English, which is extensively used in business and administration, has the status of a 'subsidiary official language.

Mozilla Community in India

• Vibrant contributors to localization, extension development, accessibility
• Localization teams
  • Building in Firefox 3, but not shipping
    • Assamese
    • Bengali
    • Hindi
    • Kanada
    • Malayalam
    • Marathi
    • Tamil
    • Telugu
  • Shipping in Firefox
    • Gujarati
    • Punjabi

Web Usage In India

• Top 15 Sites Show a Mix of
  • Google Stuff
  • Yahoo Stuff
  • OTHER top US Names
  • Local Stuff
• Projected High Growth

Web Usage In India

Mobile Web In India

Localization

• Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi
• The Strange Case of Bengali
• So what happened?

Firefox 3 Post-mortem

• The tale of a misquote...
• Different measuring stick?
• How Mozilla already has improved
  • Dashboard

FOSS.IN 2007: Project Day Wrap Up

• Project day at FOSS.IN must be participatory so Indian FOSS enthusiasts can contribute
  • Mozilla planned a very interactive day geared toward real-time contribution
• Project Day schedule included the following:
  • Introduction, Mitchell Baker
  • Hacking on Mozilla
  • Building an Extension
  • Evangelizing Mozilla in India
  • L10n workshop
  • Testing/bug day

FOSS.IN 2007

• Intern recruiting: Anant Narayanan now works as an intern for Mozilla
• Bug fixing sprint
  • Anant fixed bug 393002
  • Rahul fixed bug 403817
  • Prasad discovered and filed bug 407303
• Learned about Spicebird and introduced that team to David Ascher
• Set up tracking bug for dynamic font problems at bug 407316
• Axel worked with Runa B and Sankarshan on Bengali, answering specific questions
  • Met several other localizers from other projects

FOSS.IN 2008: What's next?

• Join organizing committee
  • Push FOSS.IN organizers to ensure updated schedule goes online
• Project Day planning
  • Engage more community members to help create the project day proposed agenda
  • Better promotion once day is secured
  • Incorporate back-end engineers
  • Resolve more bugs in real-time
• Online sign up prior to conference using Spread Firefox
• Prepare Mozilla speakers well in advance

Mozilla as Part of Platform

• What the President Said
  • Quote: "In India open-source-code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people."
• But: Microsoft Visual Studio Proliferates
• Use of MTHML
• (And recall that Validation Fails on my site tests)

Mozilla as Part of Developer's Arsenal

• Eclipse or Komodo Editor
• Firebug, Venkman, DOM Inspector
• Solutions like GWT

Modus Operandi

• Interviews with Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consulting Services (TCS)
• Build Contacts with Ministry of Information Technology
• And NASSCOM
• Conduct Seminars (Bangalore and Pune) to Coincide with foss.in/2008
• Build Community (BarCamp Bangalore)

Why This is Important

• Growing Web Population
• Growing Developers
• Growing Opportunities (SpreadFirefox)
• OpenWeb