You should now be used to its fast release pace, so it’s probably not a surprise. Chromium 12 has just been released upstream less than 2 hours ago, 6 weeks after Chromium 11. Thanks to a good preparation with the Daily PPA and Dev and Beta Channels, I’ve been able to quickly ship this major Stable release to Ubuntu. While it’s making its way to the repositories, you can as usual grab it from the stable channel for Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric. Note that those using the beta channel received the same version a few hours ago.
Chromium 12 comes with a lot of new great features, including hardware accelerated 3D CSS and a new safe browsing protection system. Note that if you were using the Google Gears plugin, it’s no longer supported. For that, the HTML5 offline feature is preferred. This release also fixes more than a dozen of security issues.
If you use Unity, the Chromium Quicklist has been translated in 21 languages since the last update around 2 weeks ago.
If you are using the Chromium browser, please answer the following survey. It’s quick, and would greatly help focus the efforts in the coming releases.
Chromium in Ubuntu is now translated in 53 languages (and a few more to come). What are your expectations about this?
(if you have a problem with a particular lang, please say so in a comment)
The Developer Tools (see right-click “Inspect Element” in any web page) are only available in English. Translations for them are open in Launchpad but are currently not enabled in the deb packages (not in Google Chrome either).
Chromium in Chinese with the developer tools
(I can’t do anything about Google Chrome, but i’m in touch with the upstream developers)
In the second part of this series of posts about the Chromium translations, I mentioned a problem with a recent change in Launchpad that triggered the loss of hundreds of strings from contributors. I also mentioned a possible future evolution meant to improve the translation coverage of stable builds. After a long fight, it seems things are getting right again. Here is what changed, and why…
Chromium 9.0.597.84 landed in Ubuntu a few hours ago. Compared to the previous stable release, it brings among other things the (opt-in) Instant search in the Omnibox (the URL bar), the Apps store and WebGL enabled by default.
It contains also a batch of security fixes. The codecs package has also been updated. Read more…
In the first part of this series of posts about the Chromium translations, I covered Grit, the format of translations used by upstream for Chromium (and Google Chrome, ChromeOS..). In another post, I recently explained the release management of this project, showing that multiple branches evolve in parallel, inside the so called Channels. In this part, I will cover the interaction with Launchpad, and show how the strings are converted back and fourth, how the Launchpad contributed strings are merged with the upstream strings, and the various problems that came up since contributions started to flow. Read more…
I’ve just submitted a security update of Chromium to Ubuntu Natty and to my fellow security sponsor Jamie for Maverick and Lucid.
It’s a minor update of Chromium version 8, namely 8.0.552.237~r70801.
The only tiny packaging change is that I landed 2 new languages that have a good enough coverage. So congratulations to the Basque and Galician translators, who started from scratch a few weeks ago and reached 100% of over 3200 strings in trunk, future version 10. That’s over 90% once backported to the (older) stable branch. You joined the 51 other languages already supported (inherited from Google Chrome), languages which also got their strings refreshed (same backport of the Launchpad strings). Read more…
This is the first part of a series of posts about the Chromium translations. This part explains how the upstream translations work, next parts will cover the interaction with Launchpad, the machinery to convert strings back and forth, the merge of all strings per branch, and how it goes back to upstream and benefits the community.
Grit format
Chromium uses a format call Grit, standing for Google Resource and Internationalization Tool. As its name implies, it is a format created by Google, which is used in many internal projects, and some open-sourced projects like Chromium. It started on Windows, and has been extended to Mac and Linux. Read more…
Good news! yesterday, a new batch of translations from the Ubuntu Translators (or should I say, from the Community) landed upstream in Chromium Trunk.
That’s all we had 2 days ago for the chromium_strings template (only this particular template, at least for now).
Even if it doesn’t make a visible difference if it’s upstreamed or not (it looks the same in the debs), it feels good to see more green and less purple in the dashboard I’ve presented earlier as it benefits not only Ubuntu, but also the other distros building Chromium, and even Chromium-OS. It also means this whole machinery is working ¹ so I’m glad I’ve spent time on this project.
As you see, there is still an awful lot of red so please, go help if you can.
Note that even new langs not in Google Chrome, like Basque (eu) and Galician (gl), have some of their strings upstreamed. So remember you all have your chance to see Chromium in your own lang.
¹ I’ve been asked to explain a bit about what’s behind all this, the conversion, the workflow, what’s so special about all this compared to other translations hosted in Launchpad. I’ll probably make a series of posts about this.
Two weeks ago, I noticed that the Chromium translations page on Launchpad showed way more green than usual. For me, “green” meant that translations come from the upstream tree. I was quite surprised to see so many strings turned green overnight, even for completely new langs and for templates I knew upstream already said they can’t take.
I quickly checked the output logs of my converter, fearing the worst, fortunately there was nothing wrong with it. I scanned the Launchpad-Translators mailing list and found it was an improvement. I read it twice, and I still don’t see what the benefit for Chromium could be. Obviously, Chromium will not move to Launchpad, not even its translations. What Launchpad gets is a gettext export, using my converter as a bidirectional gateway with the native format (Grit) living in the upstream tree, and I still don’t see that tree imported into Launchpad either (dozens nested svn and git trees, controlled by a py script called gclient managing the modular dependencies). After giving it more thoughts, I realized the old colors were more useful for my very particular use case, so I needed them back, somehow.
My first idea was to use the Launchpad API, which I use in other projects, but it quickly proved a dead end. The next idea was to directly hook that up into my converter, which is seeing all the strings after all, so it was the right place to extract figures from, and, why not, create a nice dashboard.
I went on, added more Python code to my already pretty long converter, played with some CSS gradients and created this:
I’m not a web designer. The page looks nice to me in Chromium, but is probably ugly or broken in other browsers. If you have ideas to improve it, please ping me.
This page also reports conversion errors (meaning rejected strings), which are not visible in Launchpad as Rosetta has no way of knowing there’s a problem with those strings. If you are a translator of one of those listed langs, please go fix it
The numbers are taken at the end of the conversion chain, meaning all non-red strings successfully passed all the sanity checks and should end-up in the debs.
Once strings are visible in this page, they will be in the next daily build. An almost instant reward for translators.
I don’t have a “Need Review” category, obviously, Launchpad doesn’t export those strings.
Completely new langs (declared in Launchpad but for which there’s no string yet) are not visible here (6 langs have 0 strings at the moment), you need to land at least one string.
If you look closely at both screenshots, some numbers differ, like for Spanish. 0 missing in LP, 1 in my dashboard. It’s caused by the asynchronous export of Launchpad, it always arrives too late compared to the daily build, skipping a cycle. Too bad. It would be nice to be able to schedule that export (like 1h before I kick off a build). EDIT: Spanish was a bad example, that one string is in fact bogus (it’s listed at the top of the page, so it has been rejected). That’s a better example of my 2nd and 3rd points combined.
the goal remains the same, eradicate the red, and land a maximum of strings upstream (less blue and purple).
You should now be used to its fast release pace, so it’s probably not a surprise. Chromium 12 has just been released upstream less than 2 hours ago, 6 weeks after Chromium 11. Thanks to a good preparation with the Daily PPA and Dev and Beta Channels, I’ve been able to quickly ship this major Stable release to Ubuntu. While it’s making its way to the repositories, you can as usual grab it from the stable channel for Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric. Note that those using the beta channel received the same version a few hours ago.
If you are using the Chromium browser, please answer the following survey. It’s quick, and would greatly help focus the efforts in the coming releases.
