Older Changes
1.6+ versions
Constantine has produced the XPI for Mozilla 1.6. I’ve had virtually nothing to do (which is a Good Thing™, since Real Life™ has included my moving house). A full installer for Win32 is available (2004-02-09).
1.5+ versions
Constantine Murenin contacted me, offering to help by automating the fairly tedious process of working out what gets changed in each new version of Mozilla. Real Life™ has got in the way of using this system to produce 1.5, but I’m hopeful that we can get things sorted soon; already Constantine has been invaluable in sorting out gremlins in the 1.4.1 and 1.5 language packs. If you use alpha or beta releases of Mozilla and you’d prefer to browse in a British English interface, watch this space.
A Win32 installer for the English (United Kingdom) version of Mozilla is available from the eu.mozilla.org servers (11.8 MB).
There’s a problem I’m having with the Page Info dialogue (Ctrl+I from a page) - the Privacy page doesn’t get displayed (there’s an error instead), yet the .dtd file is correct - it’s identical to the enUS file and if you install the enGB pack onto the enUS installer there’s no error. *Cough* the language pack installer wasn’t registering the p3p files, so installing the enGB pack onto enUS Mozilla left the p3p bit unchanged; because the files were identical, it was an invisible error. That’s fixed now, thanks to a pointer from Constantine.
The spellchecker is now part of 1.5, so the en-GB installer includes the British English spellchecker dictionary.
1.4.1+ versions
The quest for a smaller download continues and I saw Ken Silverman’s pngout tool, which uses his own compression routines to squeeze every last extraneous byte out of PNG images. pngout has been used to attack the images in the Help and it’s squeezed a few more bytes out of probably half the images.
1.4+ versions
Following a lead from the en-US XPI, the size of the XPI to download has been reduced by around 25% (the en-GB 1.4 XPI is now under 470kB, cf over 570kB for the 1.3.1 XPI). This has been achieved by playing with the compression levels of the various ZIP-format archives (both the XPI and enclosed JARs can be opened by any ZIP tool). By simply storing files in the JARs, compression of the XPI can work essentially on a single large text file (including the paths within, which get quite repetitive). The downside is that the installed size is now around 2MB, compared to a previous size of around 700kB.
<span class=“smug”> Of course, the en-GB XPI is still around 90kB smaller than the US pack, ’cos I converted all the images in the help file to PNGs. </span>
The help files have again been the main sink of time. Most are now valid Strict HTML 4.01; I’ve also tweaked the CSS so that the pages look right when all the <p> </p> lines are removed.
I’ve had a go at localising Chatzilla and the DOM Inspector, but I haven’t managed to get the en-GB files to ‘stick’.
1.3.1+ versions
Many thanks to Nicholas Toze, who alerted me to a problem with the 1.3 XPI when used with Mozilla 1.3.1.
1.3+ versions
A few “dialog”s and “traveled”s had slipped through in the 1.2(.1) XPI; these have been fixed. The help file has been the main focus of attention in preparing the 1.3 XPI.
1.0+ versions
“Organization”, “Customize”, “Categorize” and lots of other words that end in “-ize” have been changed to “-ise” and the “Trash” has become the “Deleted Folder”. “labeled”, “dialog” and “license” have become “labelled”, “dialogue” and “licence”.
Compared to the original en-US pack
Just for example: “color”, “behavior”, “center”, “gray”, “State”, “ZIP”, “fill out” have become -
“colour”, “behaviour”, “centre”, “grey”, “County”, “Post Code”, “fill in”.