Mozilla in Asia

With the hard work of Hung Nguyen, we have had a Vietnamese Firefox since 3.6. However, Hung is working on his own and is looking for additional help to localize Firefox as well as other Mozilla software and websites into Vietnamese. This mailing list has been set up to coordinate the localization of Firefox and other Mozilla software into Vietnamese. We are actively looking for volunteers- please come help if you are interested.

If you would like to join the mailing list, please do so here:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-vi

If you prefer the Google Groups interface (same emails, different interface) you may sign up here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.l10n.vi

Note this is a moderated list because the spam to Usenet has been severe in recent years. Only spam messages will be moderated/deleted.

Thanks to the hard work of the Mozilla Indonesia community during the Firefox 4 launch, Indonesian magazine Gatra has featured the id-Mozilla community (PDF) alongside a review of all of the major browsers. The lead photo is from Surabaya, where Josh Aas, David Mandelin and David Anderson visited.

A few months late but I wanted to announce that the Philippine Research, Education and Government Information NETwork (PREGINET) has provided a new mirror for Mozilla in the Philippines.

http://mozilla.pregi.net/

I want to thank Bani Lara and the team at PREGINET for agreeing to host a new mirror for us in the Philippines.

In this case Mozilla provided the server hardware and PREGINET is providing the bandwidth, rackspace, power, etc.

If you know of an organization who can provide mirror server bandwidth for Mozilla anywhere in the world, please do not hesitate to get in touch.  We are always looking for more mirror capacity as this is how Mozilla’s software is distributed to all of our users around the world.

Jon Russell at the Asian Correspondent points us to a Bangkok Post article, Internet use increases but Thai sites lagging behind, covering statistics on Internet usage in Thailand taken from Truehits.net (a Thailand-based firm tracking many key statistics.)

For web browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controlled a 65.6% share last year, a decline of 13 percentage points from 2009. Mozilla’s Firefox increased its share from 2.7% to 15.9%, while Google Chrome rose from 8.4% to 11.8%.

Truehits also provided a list of the top 10 Thai websites which are: sanook.com, kapook.com, mthai.com, dek-d.com, exteen.com, teenee.com, manager.co.th, truelife.com, gmember.com, and playpark.com.

In a few hours I’ll be leaving for Manila where my colleague Sid Stamm and I will be celebrating the Firefox launch with the Mozilla Philippines community this Saturday April 16th.

EVENT DETAILS HERE

If you are not already RSVPed and wish to attend, please contact the Mozilla Philippines community to see if there are any extra seats. The last I heard, the event was sold out.

I’ll be doing a talk about Firefox 4, Sid will be talking about some of the new security features of Firefox 4 and perhaps what we might expect later this year from the security team.

The Philippines market is a vibrant one for Mozilla, where Firefox has enjoyed being the dominant browser on the desktop since early 2009. Recently, we are seeing a growth in the popularity of Chrome in the Philippines (yugatech.com, jozzua.com), which makes for interesting discussions- it’s something I will certainly address in my presentation.

I’m really looking forward to spending time in Manila with the Philippine Mozillians.

As promised in my previous post, the Contributor Engagement Town Hall meeting for Asia will be scheduled for Feb. 8th at 4:00 UTC/GMT as this is the time that is available to the widest number of participants. This means that it will be:

09:30 Colombo
11:00 Jakarta
12:00 Manila
12:00 Taipei
13:00 Seoul
13:00 Tokyo

We have participants from: Sri Lanka, India, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

We do NOT have participants from Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore at this time.

I’ve debated a few different ideas around how best to hold a conference call and I think Skype is the best bet as it will be free and we should be fine with the current number of participants. If you are joining the call via Skype, please be sure to mute your audio until you are asking a question. That should help call quality.

For those of you who’s contact information I do not have, namely Arpit and Ernest Chiang, please email me your contact information as well as your Skype ID so I can add you in advance of the call.

We will be using irc.mozilla.org #mozillians as our chat channel for the call. You are welcome to join the call but I will put preference on the community members who registered their availability at Doodle.com first.

If you have questions about Mozilla’s community activities or plans for 2011, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post, please join the call or irc chat in real time, or email me at gen at mozilla dot com and I’ll do my best to address as many questions as I can during the call.

Thank you and looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion.

As 2011 starts, I am happy to be working with a newly created team, Contributor Engagement, to help Mozilla communities in Asia contribute to Mozilla. Team-mates of mine, Mary Colvig and David Boswell and William Quiviger have all blogged recently about our new team and efforts.

To that end, we are scheduling a ‘town hall meeting’ for Asian Mozilla community members next week, either Monday, February 7th, Tuesday, February 8th, or Wednesday, February 9th. This meeting would be a conference call and IRC chat to discuss contribution at Mozilla — what you enjoy about it, what could be improved, what tools you could use to make it easier to contribute to Mozilla, updates + happenings with Mozilla and so on. To start, we’d like to give an overview of the new team, share some very early 2011 plans and most importantly, get some feedback.

If you are a Mozilla community member in Asia and would like to join this call, I have selected 3 days and 5 time slots per day. Please check this poll at Doodle.com and select the time slots that are best for you.

PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SELECT YOUR TIME ZONE CAREFULLY BEFORE SELECTING ANY POSSIBLE TIMES/DATES

http://doodle.com/9hfnmpqbqh2u9vn7

I will publish the most popular time and conference call information on this blog. Please watch this blog for details of the conference call. If you have any questions about this conference call or any other question about Mozilla’s communities in Asia, please do not hesitate to contact me at gen at mozilla dot com.

I don’t have much to say because Chin says it better than I can.

Manila Standard Today — Firefox and the open Web — 2011/january/11

Curiously, Firefox has been the number one browser in the Philippines for a year now, even without such a measure in place.

In December 2009, Firefox held a commanding 61.57 percent of the Philippine browser market, while IE, at second place, accounted for only 25.27 percent.

A year later, Firefox was still number one, at 45.42 percent, but lost market share to Google Chrome, which shot to second place with a 36.97 percent share in just one year. IE use had plummeted to only 14.4 percent of the market by December 2010.

…

As a long-time Firefox user, I have avoided the Chrome bandwagon for a number of reasons. Even if Firefox is not quite as fast, it has a rich set of features that I have grown to depend on, including extensions that enable me to customize the browser as I see fit. Also, the latest beta of Firefox 4 is pretty darned fast—though it is starting to look a bit too much like Chrome for my taste.

Another reason I have stuck by Firefox, even through the rough patches, is that I believe in the objectives of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation that makes the open source browser, which is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web.

“As a non-profit organization, we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives instead of benefiting shareholders,” the foundation says on its Web site. “We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.”

By this definition, Firefox doesn’t even need to be number one—it just needs to be big enough to influence Web trends.

In contrast, both Microsoft and Google want their browsers to be number one because this will add to their bottom line. Both will pay lip service to open standards, but it’s clear where their priorities lie.

I want a Web that is dominated by neither company, so I continue to choose Firefox.

For those of you who want to know more about the awesome Mozilla community in the Philippines, please visit http://www.mozillaphilippines.org/

My first day at Mozilla was in Tokyo in January of 2006.

I was working for a search engine startup but was looking for a new opportunity as I wasn’t optimistic about that startup’s viability.

Joi Ito, who gave me the opportunity to work at that startup, contacted me early in 2006 (right after the Firefox 1.5 release) to say that, “The Mozilla guys are in Tokyo. Can you join me in some meetings with them?”

That turned out to be Chris Beard, Paul Kim and John Lilly who were in Tokyo for the first time. I was thrown into meetings and strategy sessions around starting the Tokyo office. I remember being asked at the end of that week, (by who I forget, maybe it was Joi?) “So, what do you think? Are you going to join us?”

Of course I did.

My first year at Mozilla was very intense as John worked closely with the team in Tokyo to get us up to speed and prepared for growth. I think John had 3-4 trips to Tokyo that year alone. It was a very exciting time and I learned so much about Mozilla and open source and the power of our community from John directly.

In 2007, I worked with John over multiple trips to scout out our situation in China. We ultimately hired Li Gong to lead the China effort and open our office in Beijing.

As Mozilla grew, and I changed roles to join the Evangelism team, and moved my focus from Japan to the rest of Asia, I spent less time working with John directly, but his influence on my work and perspective is ever-present.

John is not leaving Mozilla per se, although he won’t be around the office day-to-day anymore. As he joins Mozilla’s Board of Directors, his influence and guidance will continue.

John, thank you so much for all that you have given to Mozilla and to all of us.

I’ll close with a few photos from ‘back in the day’ from the archives.

For those of you on Planet Mozilla who are interested in learning more about China and trends in the Chinese Internet, I’d like to recommend the Sinica Podcast.  There’s a lot of great websites out there covering China but not many good podcasts. This one is the best, imo (at least in English.)

Sinica is proud to present a series of podcasts focusing on politics, economics, international relations and how it all relates to China. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo, with regular guest appearances by Jeremy Goldkorn, Bill Bishop and some of the leading figures in the Chinese Internet and media economy, Sinica is a show produced by those in the know for those in the know. We hope you enjoy it.

The host is Kaiser Kuo, an American-born Chinese, currently with Baidu. Other regular guests are Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei, the entrepreneur Bill Bishop, PR expert Will Moss of Imagethief, Gady Epstein of Forbes, and other guests.

What I like about this podcast is that everyone is somehow in professional media in some way and so the level of discussion is quite good.  The most recent two episodes delve into two of the recent scandals on the Chinese Internet- the Li Gang hit-and-run murder and the 360 Qihoo vs QQ controversy. These two stories couldn’t be more different from each other but they show in various ways how vastly different the Internet in China is from what we experience elsewhere.

I’m sad that there isn’t a podcast of this quality covering other countries in Asia but that’s a different rant for another day.