Staś Małolepszy Localizing Mozilla

Mibbit as an IRC protocol handler in Firefox 3.1 in your locale

We’re planning to add Mibbit as a default irc:// and ircs:// protocols handler in 3.1. The implementation in the en-US version happens in bug 435687. The bug is still open but hopefully we’re not far away from closing it soon. Many thanks to the Mibbit team for being very responsive and making the necessary changes on their side.

Once the bug is fixed, we will be able to add Mibbit for all other localization that will want it. I just filed the bug on that: bug 479030. The change itself will be done en masse, so we actually just need your “OK”. So:

If you would like to have Mibbit added in your locale, please update the whiteboard in this bug with your locale’s code.

Although Mibbit is currently localized only into French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese (Brazil), our recommendation is to add it to all locales, even if most of them are not supported right now by Mibbit. It will serve well as a demonstration of this kind of protocol handler and it will be useful for users familiar with English. We do a similar thing with 30boxes, our en-US webcal: protocol handler. We ship with it in almost all locales even though it’s available only in English.

If you wonder what an IRC protocol handler can be good for, just head over to MDC where you can see a couple of irc:// links in action. Just look on the right, under the Discuss in IRC header. I can easily imagine this kind of links on other Mozilla sites, e.g. on SUMO, or on local communities sites.

Ah, one more thing: if you know of another IRC web-based client available for your locale that you would like to include, please file a new bug under Mozilla Localizations > {your locale} with the following summary: “[{your locale's code}] Add {service name} to the default IRC protocol handlers.”

This is very, very exciting for me, since it will make MDC much more viable for folks that don’t happen to have a standalone IRC app installed for whatever reason. Great, great news.

Or you could include Chatzilla by default. Web based IRC clients are not good for IRC servers and administrators. With lots of ISPs, at least non-North American ones, autoproxying all web connections, this reduces the ability of IRC administrators and channel operators to uniquely ban abusers (even more than mibbit with non-proxied web connections, which required banning of *ident@*.mibbit.etc, instead of *@ip, and made banning specific netblocks a tedious and difficult chore).

@James
Let me quote what the Mibbit guys said in bug 435687 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435687#c27)

“FYI, we have WEBIRC setup with 327 IRC networks now, which means that on these networks, your real IP is passed along, and used as the host. So cloaking, banning, glines, open proxy scans etc all work as they should.

For the remaining networks that do not yet support WEBIRC, we do have to send the users IP in hex as the ident, so that channel ops can ban individuals. However, this has not really been a big issue over the last year.”

If I have an IRC client installed (e.g. Colloquy), what will Firefox do? Will it ask me to choose between Colloquy and Mibbit the first time I click an irc link?

Should we encourage Firefox localizers to volunteer their localization skills to Mibbit as well?

@Jesse
Yes, Firefox will treat Mibbit as any other registered handler. See this screenshot: http://informationisart.com/stas/screenshots/Launch_Application-20090223-100007.jpg

Re: localization: my hope is that by including Mibbit in Firefox we will create synergy between these two communities. I know that our localizers are busy with Mozilla products already, but if they find time, I would definitely love to see contributions to Mibbit’s l10n by Mozilla folks. Dynamis (from the Japanese l10n team) also suggested that this could be a good idea (in case there were no good local alternatives).

I’ll ping Mibbit guys to see how much work a UI localization would require.