Amidst fanfare, Firefox-3 dumps Hindi

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There has been much hullabaloo about the release of Mozilla Firefox 3, but sadly Hindi has been left out of the 46 different languages the popular browser was released in. In a blog post at Lingo24 the author rightly wonders about the exclusion of Hindi when some other Indian languages such as Punjabi and Gujarati were accommodated. The blog quotes a Mozilla spokesman putting the onus on the local volunteers. Hindi language packs, Mozilla said, needed further development. A popular Hindi blogger however recently attributed the issue to the nitpick from the peer group that has had problems with the Hindi localization team. Well such spats are not uncommon in the open source world but it seems Hindi lovers will have to wait longer till the strings are tightened.

Update: Ravi followed up on his comment made on this post, in a blog post (Hindi) and informed that DNA had also raised this issue. All in all, the newspaper report implies that the language volunteers were not motivated enough though "Mozilla admits that compared to other regions, its growth has lagged in India". Mozilla spokesperson Chris Hofmann clarified Mozilla's stand, as follows:

"...talks about motivation is definitely a misquote, it is unfortunate, and I apologies to for any misunderstanding. The question from the reporter was "Why doesn't Mozilla ship Hindi?", and the response was to say that we have worked to 46 different locale teams to get them shipping simultaneously with Firefox 3. We also talked about addons.mozilla.org which host other locales that are in development and some of which should be shipping soon. Our PR folks will follow up with the reporter to clear the misunderstanding around any lack of motivation that was implied in the article which is definitely not true, and the fact that we are very excited about the possibility of Hindi and other Indic languages shipping soon."

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Yojana now available online too

Yojana, a premier monthly published by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, is now available online at its own website http://www.yojana.gov.in. It’s commendable that the government realized that the publication, one of the best sources of meaningful discussion on socio-economic issues and government developmental policies, should be made available to the young people who are increasingly using the Internet. More commendable is the fact that the website is made available in 12 Indian languages Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Assamese, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Punjabi and Oriya apart from English.

The good looking website will be a boon for research scholars & students who for years have been following the print publication for various competitive examinations. Yojana is also working on digitization of its entire archives spanning to 51 years of its publication. [Source]