Friedbeef’s Tech

If you’re a Firefox user like 52% of this site’s visitors, you would have probably heard of ‘Spread Firefox’, which is a community aimed at promoting the use of Firefox as alternative browser among the general Internet population.

I recently managed to catch up with one of its active members, South African Firefox evangelist Charl van Niekerk, who was kind enough to provide me with a short IM interview for this piece.

In this interview we cover:

• His involvement in Firefox marketing materials
• Translations of Firefox into Afrikaans
• His thoughts on why the users of this browser are so passionate about it – and why Opera users don’t respond the same way
• What anyone can do to spread it as an alternative browser

James: Well let’s start with your projects thus far. I know you from work with Firefox flyers, Mozilla Wiki, and your involvement with the 5 minute challenge. Is there anything else you’re involved in?

Charl: The main projects I have contributed to so far are those you mentioned, although there was also the Firefox S5 (presentation slideshow) project, and localizing Firefox itself as well as some other materials to Afrikaans.

James: Translations are a great way to reach out, and I’m sure this makes it easier for native speakers to get used to this browser. Do you have direct involvement with the Mozilla organisation for this?

Charl: Not really much more than being involved with marketing; localisation teams are registered with but operate independently from the Mozilla organisation; the localisation team I am involved in is part of translate.org.za which localises various open source packages to various southern African languages

James: Are the translations already live and being used, or still work in progress, and how large of an audience are you targeting with this work?

Charl: The Firefox 1.0 translation was completed and listed on Mozilla.org; the Firefox and thunderbird 1.5 translations were completed but unfortunately a little late; currently we are working on the 2.0 translations of both Firefox and thunderbird and hope to have them ready for the release of 2.0. We hope that with the (official) release of 2.0 we will have a couple of thousand users

James: In your opinion, why do you think Opera does not have such a user community like Firefox hell-bent on conversion? It’s free, safe, arguably follows w3 standards better than Firefox, but yet the level of passion for the browser is not there. Why do you think that is so?

Charl: Opera is a great browser indeed; however, although it is free as in “no cost” it isn’t free as in “free software” as per definition of the Free Software Foundation. The source code is kept closed and nobody is allowed to view and/or modify it.

Firefox is truly “free” in all senses of the word. It is open source which means that any person has the freedom of looking how Firefox has been built and can modify it for their own use or create software packages based on it.

I think this motivates the Spread Firefox community to market it as no organisation has complete control over the software; it is public property in a way.

James: If someone wants to start getting involved in spreading Firefox, what is the easiest or first thing they should do?

Charl: I think the best thing to do would be to register on SpreadFirefox.com, browse around, hear what others are doing and if you have a good idea of your own, to post about it and get feedback. Contributing to others’ projects is normally quite easy also. The more contributors, the bigger the success! :)

Charl van Niekerk is working for a software development company in the city of George, South Africa. One of his current pet projects is an overhaul of Mozilla Materials. If you’re reading this using Internet Explorer, find out what all the hype is about!