Nikkei Research has a recent survey of 5000 Japanese Internet users and 60% of them have Yahoo! Japan as their home page. The momentum of habit is quite powerful here in Japan, although when trends hit, they do come quickly.
Gang Lu of Mobinode reports that Tencent has launched a Firefox plugin for their QQ service. This is important because QQ is probably the most widely used consumer Internet service in China.
I haven’t had much time to blog recently as we’re preparing for our developer event on June 16th, but I wanted to point people to a few Mozilla folks who are blogging on topics that might be of interest to you.
Johnathan Nightingale is working on various areas for FX3 including EV certificates. Here Johnathan talks about some possible UI presentations for EV SSL certs in Firefox 3.
Li Gong, who is heading up our efforts in China, writes about Chinese names and how we decided on the Chinese name for our new China-based operation. I’ll also link to Mike Schroepfer who recently visited Beijing with Johnny Stenback.
Samuel Sidler, who is working on new efforts around customer support for Firefox, is also a contributor to the Camino Project. The Camino guys recently launched their 1.5 release of Camino and it’s a significant upgrade. Congrats to the Camino team!
John Slater, Creative Director at Mozilla, talks about t-shirt culture and new efforts that are in process around our merchandising.
Mitchell Baker, our head Lizard Wrangler, recently accepted the World Information Society Award given to Mozilla by the International Telecommunication Union. Mitchell’s speech summary is here.
Last but not least is JT Batson, who is on the marketing team, writes about our planned efforts to expand our reach to areas where we have not been active except at the volunteer community level so far. I’m most excited about expanding our marketing in Asia as we need to do a lot more in Asia to raise the awareness of Firefox as an alternative choice.
I’ve written in the past about the browser monopoly in South Korea. Korea University’s Keechang Kim has been working with other concerned volunteers to force the Korean government to support more than 1 browser. The recent news is that their efforts are bearing fruit. There’s still a long way to go, and user behavior won’t change overnight, but the foundation for support for more than 1 browser is being laid.
MS Web Browser Monopoly Weakens [koreatimes.co.kr]
Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk has a great overview of Google Gears.
I’ve been meaning to write up a quick report from the NILS Conference 2 weeks ago but I’ve just been swamped. I will get some thoughts out on that sometime soon but I wanted to quickly note that eBay has purchased StumbleUpon for $75 million in cash (the ‘in cash’ part is amazing too.) I often use StumbleUpon as an example of a business that got popular by starting as an extension to Firefox. SU was mentioned in our NILS presentation 2 weeks ago as a widely-reported rumor. Now it is fact.
This is a little ‘inside baseball’ but it was kinda funny to watch Stephen Colbert make fun of open source software during his introduction of Viacom CEO, Philippe Dauman, at the D Conference.
