About the project

History of Mozilla Russia project

Let's begin our story about Mozilla Russia by mentioning the people who started the localization of Mozilla's products.

In 2000-2001, when the Mozilla Suite has gradually acquired the complete product features, its localization was maintained by Valentina Vaneeva, employed by the Tomsk branch of Stack company. Previously, this company produced a localized version of Netscape Navigator, branded as «Sibkom Navigator». Since version 0.8.x builds were produced by Alexei Novodvorsky of ALTLinux Team. After some time Vadim Vinichenko joined to translation team and started translation of help files. Sergei Degtyarev added Russian search engines to ALT Linux build of Mozilla Suite. Daniil Smirnov opened project Sidebar.ru.

Thanks to all these talented and hardworking people, the Russian builds of Mozilla Suite included Russian spellcheck dictionary since beginning. This dectionary was absent in the official version, issued by mozilla.org.

Announces of new Russian builds of Mozilla Suite and some news from the world of Mozilla were regularly published on www.mozilla.ru website.

This team had carried out tremendous work. Localizations of modern Mozilla's products are partly based upon the translations done by these people!

The current stage of Mozilla Russia history began in October 2004, when the project came under the management of Alexander Slovesnik, better known as Unghost. At that time Unghost was working on translation of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1, gradually mastering another products from the world of Mozilla.

RED, Unghost and Ragnaar were already familiar, working together on RU-Board forum.

Unghost and LAKostis created forum and asked RED to test their work. Quite quickly, we created subforums, agreed that Unghost would be project coordinator, and RED — the moderator of the forum. And, on 21 October 2004, forum officially had been opened.

On summer of 2005 ZenGeist had created IRC-channel for Russian users of Mozilla Firefox.

Thanks to the hard work of Ragnaar (web-designer) and RED, new website has been born in November 2005.

In 2006, process of transferring Mozilla Russia's resources to a new domain Mozilla-Russia.org has been started.

The main activities of the Mozilla Russia team

Localization of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, KompoZer, Bugzilla and ChatZilla.
Creation and localization of extensions for supported products.
Technical support all the above products on the forum and IRC-channel.

Mozilla Russia team

Alexander Slovesnik aka Unghost
Localizer of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and ChatZilla, administrator of the forum and site.: Project coordinator and team leader; localizer of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and ChatZilla; administrator of the forum and site Mozilla Russia.
Yuri Merkulov aka RED
Technical writer, forum moderator: One of forum moderators, the author of texts on Mozilla Russia site. He has published several technical articles and wrote the book «Firefox and Thunderbird self-taught». He is a translator of Scrapbook extension.
Alexey Gubanov aka Ragnaar
Localizer of NVU, KompoZer and Sunbird, administrator of the forum and site.: A professional Web-designer. He has designed www.mozilla-russia.org, nvu.mozilla-russia.org and other sites. Localizer of NVU, KompoZer and Sunbird, administrator of the forum and site Mozilla Russia.
Alexei Gladkov aka Legion
Technical Administrator: A professional software developer. He is the administrator of bugzilla.mozilla-russia.org and supports mailing lists for the Mozilla-Russia.org. He participates in ALTLinux QA Team and creates builds of Mozilla's products for ALTLinux distributions.

Ex team members

Konstantin Lepikhov aka LAKostis
One of the project founders: Former project leader; adapted PunBB forum code to the needs of Mozilla Russia. He supported forum and did team operations. Currently participates in ALTLinux Team and Mozilla community as reps member.
Nikolay Frantsev aka Shutnik
Technical Administrator, forum moderator: A professional software developer, extensions developer. He had been engaged in development of community site and forum.

Official address of Mozilla Russia —

Acknowledgments

Mozilla Россия — is not just us. Colorful, exciting world of Mozilla products — the result of work of huge number of people. Without all of them it wouldn't be possible to develop our project.

First and foremost we want to thank first team of Mozilla products translators, who has made the most difficult part of the work. It is much easier to walk on your footsteps.

Thanks to all forum participants for warm and friendly atmosphere of communication.

Mozilla Россия