10 Years of German Mozilla releases

Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.

(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)

Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.

To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).

I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.

With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!