Changes to productization of Firefox are such interface changes. Replacing a news reader with a different one or adding a search engine plug-in are good examples. They should be only changed in major releases. For 3.0 there was a major review of default web services for every locale (there was a review bug for every locale), and we will probably do something similar in the future too (Firefox 4 anyone?).

For the 3.1 release, we’re going to mostly stick with choices made for 3.0, but it’s a good opportunity nevertheless to make changes to productization of Firefox in your locale, if you feel that users will benefit from them.

It’s also a good moment to check if there aren’t any outstanding changes that were supposed to happen earlier (e.g. for the 3.0 release), but for some reason didn’t happen. Today I worked with András Tímár from the Hungarian team and we were able to fix bug 478878, bringing 3 new search engine plug-ins to Hungarian Firefox. Thanks Andras for a quick turnaround!

If there are any similar web services related bugs or requests for your locale that went unnoticed in Bugzilla, please ping me in IRC (nick: stas) or leave a comment below. I’ll do my best to look into all of them in the near future.

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.”