Mozilla in Asia

With the most recent update to Safari 3.2, Apple has added support in their user interface for extended validation SSL certificates, or EVSSL.

The problem with Safari 3.2’s implementation is that the UI is quite subtle, way in the upper-right hand corner. There’s no standard as to how to implement support for EV certs in browsers but clearly what Apple has done with Safari is mere compliance, not a thorough consideration of how best to show that information in the browser.

I’m biased but I clearly think Firefox 3.0’s implementation is better. No certificate mumbo-jumbo that no one outside of certificate authorities knows anything about.  Clear and obvious language that is readable and understandable by anyone who would use a browser on the Internet.

The New York Times has an article up recently about the goal to cut start up times for personal computers:
In Age of Impatience, Cutting PC Start Time.

In coming months, the world’s major PC makers plan to introduce a new generation of quick-start computers, spotting a marketing opportunity in society’s short attention span.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people access to basic functions like e-mail and a Web browser in 30 seconds or less. Asus, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest maker of the circuit boards at the center of every PC, has begun building faster-booting software into its entire product line.

It’s interesting to see how users perceptions about the impact of start times has changed more quickly than the operating systems have.

The New York Times article talks about how some of the current solutions use Linux and a browser (usually Firefox or a Gecko-based browser.)

Until Microsoft comes up with a way to greatly shorten the time it takes to load Windows, PC makers are speeding up boot times using programs that bypass Windows. The systems vary technically, but they all rely on a version of an operating system called Linux that gives users quick access to Web browsing and other basic functions of their computer. In some cases, Windows never boots, while in others, Windows starts in the background.

The NYT article didn’t mention it by name but the category of PCs in question here are netbooks.

Jeff Atwood has a post up about his new netbook and how much he uses the web browser on it vs. any other application: The Web Browser is the New Laptop.

Every day, more and more of what we need to do is delivered through a browser, with fewer and fewer compromises. I spend ridiculous, unhealthy amounts of time browsing the web, and this netbook does that with aplomb. At this point, who cares what operating system you run? Choice of web browser will have a far more profound impact on most people’s daily lives. As the prices for netbooks inevitably collapse, they are poised to transform the entire computer market, threatening both Apple and Microsoft.

This reminds me of Toni Schneider’s (CEO of Automattic) post from February 2007, when he claimed that he only needed a browser to do his work: The Firefox computer.

I want a Firefox computer. A nice, sleek, solid state notebook with a big screen that you open up and it just runs Firefox. I bet this could be had for a reasonable price, it could have a nice long battery life and start up almost instantly. I’d still have a PC or Mac at home to store my photos and music, but for my everyday work life the Firefox computer is all I need.

Toni foresaw the demand for the netbooks that are gaining in popularity today. The big question is what is next after the OS blends into the background as is being documented by the NY Times.

This news is a few weeks old but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a Firefox add-on, built by a team called kekeke, was the winner of the 2008 Yahoo! Kimo (Taiwan) Open Hack Day. If anyone has any more information about the team who won, or the add-on that was developed, please leave a comment.

The winners, kekeke, wrote a Firefox extension which allows users to select any keyword on any website and receive a summary of several Yahoo API search results (Flickr, Map, Knowlege Plus, and Lifestyle), without opening a new browser window. More relevant results will display in a stronger colour and users can save for later, or share results with friends.

Danny Kim at TechnoKimchi has new browser share numbers in South Korea. It’s pretty ugly.

IE: 98.66% Korean Browser Market Share

If that is not a defacto monopoly (especially when you consider the market share that other browsers have elsewhere in the world), then I don’t know what is.

Background information on why S. Korea is an all-Microsoft, all-Internet Explorer nation is available on older posts on my blog including, the cost of monoculture, update on the cost of monoculture in Korea.

I hope to be able to write another update for 2008 before the end of this year. Whether I can be more positive than I have been in the past is yet to be determined.

Lest anyone think Mozilla isn’t keenly focused on the speed of our next-generation JavaScript engine, TraceMonkey, Brendan Eich shares the news about where TraceMonkey stands vs. Google Chrome’s new V8 JS engine: Brendan’s Roadmap Updates – TraceMonkey Update.

More details at Brendan’s blog post.
UPDATE: Andreas Gal and Mike Shaver also share comments on TraceMonkey.

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, interviews Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, of Mozilla.

You can find the audio of the interview here:
Open Voices Interview with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla

And a transcript of the interview here:
Mitchell Baker Transcript : Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast

Lots of historical information in this interview. Highly recommended.

Jim Zemlin: I’m just curious as to, was Microsoft something that really drove what you were doing? {audio dropout} there a feeling in the people who {audio dropout} worked at the Mozilla Foundation at the time and worked on the project of, you know, “We can’t abide by a de facto monopoly web browser, that in order for the internet to be free, we’ve got to be successful,”? Was that mentality present at the time?

Mitchell Baker: Oh, sure. There are some things about Netscape mentality, but when you get past that, when you get the Mozilla Project, and for example why I was there and stuck with it and why a number of people did, one reason is absolutely that. That the browser turned out to be key in how, you know, human beings access the Internet. And if there’s only one way to do it, and there’s only one way to get to the information on the Internet, and that pathway is controlled by a single business entity and a single business plan, and, you know, one that’s giant and has shown itself to be very aggressive at using its assets to promote itself, then you’re in for a disaster. And I think we can see that. Because in, like, 2000, 2001, 2002 when we didn’t have a good product out on the market yet and there was essentially no browser competition, if you look back to it, you can remember that it was full of pop-up ads and spyware and, you know, whole computers slowing down because of all the stuff that was coming in through the one available browser. So we still believe and feel vindicated that you’ve got to have more than one option in these settings.

The later in the interview:

Jim Zemlin: What is it about a project like this—or Linux or Apache—that is so exciting to people; that motivates people to go to such extreme lengths of sacrificing personal time and, you know, extending huge amounts of emotional, physical energy towards something like that at these type of projects? What is it, in your mind, that drives people to participate?

Mitchell Baker: It’s a set of things. Some people have all of them; some people only have one or two of them. In some cases, it’s the sense that what you’re doing actually matters. And that one can see that the openness of the Internet that we want to live in can be affected, can be made more likely by the work that we do. So that’s one thing.

For many of us, the Internet itself. I sometimes say I have the Internet bug, or I was bitten by the Internet bug. I say that because I had malaria once. {Laughs} You know, it’s in the blood, right. There’s nothing you can do about it. And while you’ve got it and while it’s there, you know, you have to live with it because it’s just unavoidable. And I also feel that way about what I call the Internet bug. Alright, it is just such a powerful tool and so exciting, and there’s so much positive that can happen from it and anything that powerful can have that sort of a dark and unpleasant side. And you roll all those things with the feeling that, “Wow, you know, all of this is possible and we can make it better.” I think I’m not the only one who’s got that bug.

A third reason is technology. We’ve always been blessed that we have great technology and very smart people working on it. And that tends to attract other really smart people. And I think you’ll find, at many open source projects—you’ve named the big ones of course—but many of the smaller ones as well, it’s a love of the technology that’s also important.

And there is a sense, I would say, of community and bonding that is an extreme motivator. Sometimes people ask me why anyone would work on a software project if they weren’t getting paid for it. Well, think about how many people don’t like their job. Or feel like they’ve got expertise that doesn’t get used. Or their colleagues or their management or the people they’re responsible for get in the way. Or the company is going in a direction that doesn’t make sense and cuts off all the interesting projects. And your advancement isn’t based on reputation or skill, it’s based on, you know, who happens to like you. Well, we can mitigate or eliminate almost all of those things in an open source project. And so it turns out a lot of people do not want to be couch potatoes, right. And if you provide a setting in which something really interesting is happening, and it matters; you can see that other people use it and it’s got really smart people working on it, and they will accept you if you find interesting things to do, and some of them will even help you. And you can see the results of that, you know, you can generate a reputation and have people interested in you and have your work used by millions of people. That rolls up into a pretty motivating package.

The later in the interview Zemlin asks Mitchell about Mozilla and trademarks vs. how Linux handles trademarks.  That’s maybe the most interesting part of the interview, in my opinion. Finally, Zemlin asks Mitchell for advice re: trademarks and the Linux desktop.

EDIT: The article is now on the front page of the BOTH the Business section AND the Technology section!

NY Times, Business section, front page, Monday, May 26th

NY Times, Technology section, front page, Monday, May 26th

The New York Times is my hometown paper, and I’m a regular reader of The Grey Lady, so it’s a pleasure to see Mozilla’s efforts for Firefox 3 profiled in my paper: Open-Source Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers.

With tasks like e-mail and word processing now migrating from the PC to the Internet, analysts and industry players think the browser will soon become even more valuable and strategically important.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

Intel® C++ Software Development Tool Suite 1.0 for Linux* OS Supporting Mobile Internet Devices
Free IDE for mobile linux development.

OECD Broadband Portal – Press release
Data on broadband growth.

Firebug 1.2 beta for Firefox 3 RC 1
Works with Firefox 3 RC 1! Might have a few bugs but please check it out.

Q&A with Isaac Mao on tech blogging in China: Censorship, and opportunity
Isaac was very helpful when we visited Shanghai in 2007 before we opened the Mozilla Beijing office.

Cisco Systems Denies Online Censorship Role in China
Cisco internal documents show otherwise.

Cisco Leak: ‘Great Firewall’ of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers
Not surprised; very disappointed.

Cisco saw opportunity in “Golden Shield” to help fight criminals…and dissidents
Must-read from Rebecca MacKinnon on Cisco-firewall-gate.

cisco_presentation.pdf
Read and be depressed with me.

China’s All-Seeing Eye
Naomi Klein for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Open-Source File Format Is to Be a Part of Microsoft Office
Embrace & extend.

Report: JUI (Javascript User Interface) 2008 conference in Tokyo
Akky and Serkan have made Asiajin a must-read in 2008.

Firefox 3 Usability Survey
Isriya Paireepairit of the Mozilla community in Thailand would like your help with a survey he is working on for his university studies.

Metagold: A Research Blog about Nico Nico Douga
Fascinating English-language look into the hot video web service of Japan.

Economist.com Correspondent’s Diary – Tokyo food
Excellent Tokyo food blog.

Linux Foundation Opens Korean Office
The LiMoKr must be targeting enterprises or just the server market because the Linux desktop is dead in the water in Korea without support for SEED and Korea’s unique Windows/ActiveX-based encryption method.

ADDED:

.jp Registry report 2007
Lower fees, more coordination within Asian registrars, expansion of JP DNS servers, DNSSEC.  Personally, I am still on the fence with regards to i18nized domains.

There have been a number of posts recently looking at new features of Firefox 3 including the new smart location bar (a.k.a. Awesomebar), the new bookmarks functionality, color profile support, the site identification button, the 3 new themes, to name just a few.

I’d like to take a look at one of the new changes for Firefox 3 – support for UTF-8 multi-byte uris. To give credit where it is due, this functionality is already available in Internet Explorer 7, in Safari 3, and in Opera 9. However, this functionality is slightly different in these browsers (which I will explain further below.)

For those of us who mainly use the Roman-language us-ascii web, you may not notice one of big changes for Firefox 3: UTF-8 multi-byte support in the location bar. This is a very large usability win because previously non-Roman ascii language uris were unreadable in Firefox 2. In Firefox 3, they are now human readable.

As an extreme example, here is the Japanese wikipedia page for the place in Japan that has the longest name, 愛知県海部郡飛島村大字飛島新田字竹之郷ヨタレ南ノ割。

For those of you who study Japanese, you would pronounce it like this: 「あいちけんあまぐんとびしまむらおおあざとびしましんでんあざたけのごうよたれみなみのわり。」

In Firefox 2 where the location bar would not display the Japanese multi-byte characters, the encoded uri is 254 (!!!) characters.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%84%9B%E7%9F%A5%E7%9C%8C%E6%B5%B7%E9%83%A8%E9%83%A1%E9%A3%9B%E5%B3%B6%E6%9D%91%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%97%E9%A3%9B%E5%B3%B6%E6%96%B0%E7%94%B0%E5%AD%97%E7%AB%B9%E4%B9%8B%E9%83%B7%E3%83%A8%E3%82%BF%E3%83%AC%E5%8D%97%E3%83%8E%E5%89%B2

In Firefox 3, where the location bar supports UTF-8, the uri is 54 characters (and is readable within an average laptop browser window.)

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/愛知県海部郡飛島村大字飛島新田字竹之郷ヨタレ南ノ割

Human readability and a shorter uri together make this quite an important feature, especially for non-Roman ascii language parts of the web (which I think are the parts of the web that may be growing the fastest recently.)

Two other examples to show the extremes of multi-byte uris in ascii text:

The Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is 58 characters in length.

In Wikipedia Japanese, it becomes a 389 character encoded uri in Firefox 2.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%83%97%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B0%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AE%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B2%E3%83%AA%E3%83%95%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%AB%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%83%AD%E3%83%96%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B7%E3%83%AA%E3%82%AA%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B4%E3%82%B4%E3%83%9B

It is a mere 69 characters if we can use a browser that supports encoded multi-byte characters in the uri.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ランヴァイル・プルグウィンギル・ゴゲリフウィルンドロブル・ランティシリオゴゴゴホ

Here is a Japanese wikipedia page that has information about a portion of the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement. It is a 704 character encoded uri in Firefox 2.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%9B%BD%E3%81%A8%E3%82%A2%E3%83%A1%E3%83%AA%E3%82%AB%E5%90%88%E8%A1%86%E5%9B%BD%E3%81%A8%E3%81%AE%E9%96%93%E3%81%AE%E7%9B%B8%E4%BA%92%E5%8D%94%E5%8A%9B%E5%8F%8A%E3%81%B3%E5%AE%89%E5%85%A8%E4%BF%9D%E9%9A%9C%E6%9D%A1%E7%B4%84%E7%AC%AC%E5%85%AD%E6%9D%A1%E3%81%AB%E5%9F%BA%E3%81%A5%E3%81%8F%E6%96%BD%E8%A8%AD%E5%8F%8A%E3%81%B3%E5%8C%BA%E5%9F%9F%E4%B8%A6%E3%81%B3%E3%81%AB%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%9B%BD%E3%81%AB%E3%81%8A%E3%81%91%E3%82%8B%E5%90%88%E8%A1%86%E5%9B%BD%E8%BB%8D%E9%9A%8A%E3%81%AE%E5%9C%B0%E4%BD%8D%E3%81%AB%E9%96%A2%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B%E5%8D%94%E5%AE%9A%E3%81%AE%E5%AE%9F%E6%96%BD%E3%81%AB%E4%BC%B4%E3%81%86%E5%88%91%E4%BA%8B%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%E6%B3%95

It is 104 characters using Japanese in the uri:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本国とアメリカ合衆国との間の相互協力及び安全保障条約第六条に基づく施設及び区域並びに日本国における合衆国軍隊の地位に関する協定の実施に伴う刑事特別法

These are extreme examples to show what happens when a multi-byte uri becomes encoded.

Here is an enlarged image of Firefox 2 of a uri from the Japanese volunteer translated Mozilla Developer Center documentation on Vine Linux. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

You can see that the uri after “MDC:” is unreadable encoded text. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

In Firefox 3 it looks like this: (Click on the image to see it larger.)

It’s a tad blurry but I hope you can see that the uri says “MDC:日本語版” which means ‘Japanese language.’

Here are 3 screenshots of Firefox 2 in Vista, Mac OS, and Vine Linux, as well as 3 shots of Firefox 3 in Vista, Mac OS, and Ubuntu to show you the differences. You can click on the images to see larger images if you would prefer that.

Firefox 2 on Vista (non-human readable because of encoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Firefox 2 on Mac OS (non-human readable because of encoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Firefox 2 on Vine Linux (non-human readable because of encoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Firefox 3 on Vista (human readable with decoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Firefox 3 on Mac OS (human readable with decoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.04 (human readable with decoded uri; click on image to view larger)

Dynamis helped me make the screenshots in Japanese just as an example (as that’s the non-Roman ascii language that we are most comfortable with) but if you have examples from your non-Roman ascii language, please feel free to post Firefox 3 screenshots to the web and leave uris in the comments so people can see how this might work in another non-Roman ascii multi-byte character set.

With respect to how browsers handle this functionality differently, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3 all automatically decode uris in the location bar so that they are human-readable. IE7 has support for UTF-8 multi-byte uris but will not automatically decode them in the location bar.

There are no specifications anywhere for this browser behavior as far as I know (please correct me if I am wrong.)

Finally, note that pages that are not UTF-8 encoded will not be decoded properly in Firefox 3 if the uri is multi-byte.

It is a small feature, but for those of us who spend time in the multi-byte Internets, it is a very, very important feature for both readability and usability.

Thank you to dynamis and jdaggett for the review and help.

Some other posts about new features in Firefox 3

• Firefox 3: Awesomebar (Smart location bar)
• Firefox 3: Bookmarks
• Firefox 3: Color profile support
• Firefox 3: Site identification button
• Firefox 3 Themes

Some links I enjoyed today…

• HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com – Interview with Mike Shaver – Chief Evangelist – Mozilla: Great, detailed interview with my colleague Mike Shaver on Mozilla.
• ZDNet – What Microsoft can teach Apple about software updates: Ed Bott of ZDNet agrees with Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly on the recent controversy where Apple is using their Software Update mechanism to send Safari to iTunes users on Windows.
• TechCrunch – Bridging Desktop And Web Applications – A Look At Mozilla Prism: Matthew Gertner deep dives into site-specific browsing.
• ArsTechnica – Safari 3.1 on Windows: a true competitor arrives (seriously): “Fonts are still a problem. In fact, for me, the fonts are a deal-breaker. Safari 3.1 for Windows continues to use the Mac OS X font anti-aliasing mechanism rather than ClearType, which is the native font anti-aliasing system in Windows. The result is text that is often fuzzy, particularly smaller text. Sometimes small text looks bold when it isn’t.”
  • Comments on the ArsTechnica review of Safari 3.1: “Mind you, I prefer the look of Leopard to Vista, but in the overall context of Vista Safari looks drab. ‘Drab’ is better in Leopard, but on Vista it looks like Cheney in a hunting coat among the tuxedo wearers.”

• Fast Company – Dead Man Walking — AOL and Time Warner — AOL Troubles: “…what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation.“