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mozilla/gecko-dev

Localization

Firefox ships in 100+ locales. Strings live in two formats: classic .properties / .dtd files (legacy) and Fluent .ftl files (modern).

Fluent

Fluent is Mozilla's localization system, designed for natural-language nuances (genders, plurals, lookups, terms). The runtime lives in intl/l10n/, with bindings under dom/l10n/ and toolkit/components/mozintl/.

A snippet:

hello = Hello, {$name}!
welcome = Welcome to { -brand-short-name }.

Localizers translate .ftl files in separate l10n repositories (one per locale, e.g. mozilla-l10n/firefox-l10n); CI assembles the localized builds.

Where strings live in this tree

  • <app>/locales/en-US/**/*.ftl — English source (e.g., browser/locales/en-US/).
  • <app>/locales-preview/ — preview / experimental strings.
  • dom/locales/, toolkit/locales/, mobile/locales/ — per-app source strings.

ICU and i18n

intl/ contains internationalization utilities (segmenter, locale matching, lookup) plus a vendored copy of ICU.

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Localization – Gecko wiki | Factory