Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 Releases Coming

Just days after the releases of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.5 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5, it appears likely that 1.0.6 versions of the two applications could be coming as early as next week. It is understood that API changes in 1.0.5 unintentionally broke some extensions.

In comment 45 of bug 300028, Rafael Ebron said yesterday, "We received feedback on 1.0.5 from distributors and extension developers on API changes that affected them (not a security issue), so we're looking at a 1.0.6 to fix it." It is known that the Enigmail PGP extension for Thunderbird does not work in version 1.0.5.

At the moment, the 1.0.5 releases of Firefox and Thunderbird are only available in American English (en-US). No localised builds have been placed online for download and localisation teams have been asked not do any further work on the 1.0.5 releases. It appears that these localised editions of 1.0.5 will be skipped altogether, with the next localised release being 1.0.6.

Many localisers are not happy with the situation. Some have complained about the lack of clear information given by the Mozilla Foundation and expressed concern that their users are vulnerable to several publicised security flaws. A number of messages have been posted in bug 300028 (created to track the releases of the Firefox 1.0.5 localisations) and the netscape.public.mozilla.l10n newsgroup (l10n is an abbreviation for localisation).

"Please, stop being so vague! Just tell us what the problem is!" pleaded Marek Stepien, who works on the Polish localisation, in a message to the netscape.public.mozilla.l10n newsgroup about the Firefox 1.0.5 localisation situation. "We are getting lots of e-mails from Firefox users in Poland asking us about why isn't Firefox 1.0.5 available in Polish (and we, the l10n team, are being blamed for the delay). The journalists are also asking us the same questions... A few days more and it's gonna be a big PR disaster for Firefox outside the USA."

Zbigniew Braniecki expressed similiar sentiments in comment 38 of bug 3000028: "We gather very bad press, we're blamed by users, we have no reason to explain this, we don't know how to explain this to journalists who're asking about this issue... Tens of millions of users are still using 1.0.4 while critical security bugs are already published after [the] en-US 1.0.5 release. I want to say that this seems to be absolutely ignored by [the] Mozilla Foundation and by such delays you waste [the] huge amount of work l10n teams are doing to promote our brands on local markets."

Thanks to Brian King for posting about the 1.0.5 localisation issues on his weblog, which alerted us to the current situation.

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posted by Unknown @ 12:49