Yahoo! Japan has launched their re-designed home page (it launched earlier this year actually) and the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan is showcased (scroll down, on the left.)
If you are a Yahoo! Japan user, this version of Firefox ships with the Yahoo! Japan toolbar installed and should be helpful.
Via flors I see that Ari Jaaksi, a Vice President of Software at Nokia, recently presented on “What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help” at OSiM USA 2008. Jaaksi’s presentation is also available in pdf and Podshow is also providing an mp3. I recommend the mp3 audio as the presentation is largely images.
Jaaksi’s presentation is very relevant to Mozilla because Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet ships with Maemo Linux as the operating system and Mozilla’s Gecko is used as the rendering engine for the Maemo Browser. I know from recent discussions with Christian Sejersen and Jay Sullivan of Mozilla’s mobile team that Mozilla very much values Nokia’s participation in the Mozilla project.
Jaaksi’s presentation touched on these points:
While the entire presentation was worth reviewing, starting around 16:40 in Jaaksi’s presentation are some interesting and insightful comments about Nokia and working in open source. In response to a question about whether Nokia contributed patches back to Webkit around the implementation of Webkit in Nokia’s S60 platform, Jaaksi was open and honest and said that Nokia did not do enough in that instance. He then went on to say that Nokia plans to work more closely with the open source projects they are shipping code from in the future.
Note: when Jaaksi talks about the ‘upstream model’ what he means to say is contributing patches regularly back to the original project’s codebase. I’ve also added in some clarification in brackets in the transcription below to make it more clear as to what exactly Jaaksi is referring to.
Question from the audience (@ 16:20): Excuse me, another question. If I remember correctly, it was 3 years ago when you [Nokia] implemented Webkit in to the Series 60 devices, you had to make a lot changes, for example in memory management. Did you use the ‘upstream model’ in that case? I mean, did you feed back to the community the changes you had made for your devices?
Answer from Ari Jaaksi: Not the way we [Nokia] should have done it. Let me be very honest about that. Also with our Internet tablets we have horror stories where we didn’t do it [share patches back with the trunk]. Just today, or yesterday I discussed this with the Mozilla guy, the name escapes me at the moment, I don’t know if he is here today, about our Mozilla browser here. It is really that, what we did was last summer when we started to ship with the Mozilla browser we made a couple of mistakes. We are kind of working upstream there [with Mozilla] but we are not doing as much as I would like to do and we sort of need to go back. We almost forked the code [from Mozilla] but we need to go back [to sync up with the main Gecko 1.9 trunk].
Also in the [Webkit] browser on the Series 60 devices, I claim that the Webkit situation is not a trivial case. There are… Apple forked it. We [Nokia] kind of forked it. There are some challenges now [due to the forking of code from the Webkit trunk]. This is something that we as an industry should learn [not to do]. This [forking code] is not benefitting anybody if we do it like that. That is kind of my message here. Good question.
I, for one, am very glad to see Nokia using open source, and it’s clear from Jaaksi’s presentation and comments that while Nokia has had some challenges in developing with open source code, they are learning how better to work with open source communities (like Mozilla) to provide innovative products to Nokia’s customers. It’s great to hear that Nokia plans to sync back with the core Gecko code base as Nokia (and the users of the Nokia products that will ship with Gecko) will get all the benefits that the entire Mozilla community is working on for the current version of Gecko 1.9 and beyond.
Thank you to Ari Jaaksi and the entire Nokia open source development team for their hard work and efforts. We look forward to your future products, especially those made with OSS and especially Mozilla.
This post is for any of the Japanese readers I have.
ZDNet Japanさんが弊社の Brendan Eich との対談ビデオを日本語字幕で出しましたので JavaScript に興味を持つ方、ぜひご覧下さい。
ITの歴史にイノベーションを巻き起こした技術者に話を聞くシリーズインタビュー「Super Techies」。このビデオでは、現在MozillaのCTOであり、JavaScriptを開発したことでも知られるBrendan Eich氏が、シリコンバレーでのプログラマーとしてのキャリアや、Firefoxの展望について語る。
As reported yesterday by Internet Watch (ja) and Broadband Watch (ja), Yahoo! Japan has renewed their software download center and is showcasing both a toolbar for Firefox (Yahoo!ツールバー Firefox版) as well as the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan (available for Mac or Win.) This is good news for all of the Yahoo! Japan users who also like to use Firefox.
I was initially happy to hear that Baidu is now providing a browser-based security service (百度安全中心) which includes a basic vulnerability and virus scanner for users in China but was disappointed to hear that the service is ActiveX based and therefore only available for Internet Explorer on Windows. If you try to use the service without Internet Explorer, you get sent to an error page. Granted, the error page says that Baidu will be supporting Vista and Firefox “soon”, but if this service is via ActiveX controls, those will not work in Firefox (nor Opera, nor Safari, and therefore also not on the Macintosh nor on Linux.) Also Active-X has a history of security problems and as of 2008 US-CERT is recommending disabling ActiveX in IE, so in this case, the bar is set very high for Baidu to provide a truly secure solution via Active.
Baidu has such broad marketshare in China, there are opinions that the computer security industry (selling anti-virus software) would be significantly negatively impacted by this service if Baidu’s service is free. Clearly a free service that would be browser-based (vs. something that is either not free or requires a download) is the easiest option for users, but it’s not clear that such a solution would provide the best security. If this service becomes popular and computer security vendors lose the retail market for security software, it’s not clear that users will be any safer and if the plugin was not designed properly, they may be much worse off.
There is the fact that Macintosh and Linux users are essentially unaffected by viruses and spyware that target the Windows platform, but providing a browser-agnostic solution should be the goal.
This news is a few weeks old but nonetheless important to note.
Matrix Partners Establishes USD275mn China Fund
Matrix Partners has a new China fund led by David Zhang, who left WI Harper to join Bo Shao at Matrix. This is news to me because Matrix has funded mobile browser OpenWave and the brand new SkyFire (who use Mozilla’s Gecko engine on the server) and Zhang funded Maxthon at WI Harper.
Christian Sejersen and Jay Sullivan from Mozilla’s mobile team will be in Tokyo on February 18th to speak at Mobile Monday Tokyo. Unfortunately the event is not free (it costs 1000 yen if you pre-register) but it should be an interesting evening as Michael Smith from the W3C will also be speaking. I hope to see you there!
Internet Watch reports, IE7日本語版、自動更新よる配布開始は「2008年2月13日」 (Japanese), that Microsoft Japan will push out the automatic upgrade to IE7 to Japanese users of IE6 on Feb. 13th, 2008. (The schedule was actually announced by Microsoft Japan back in May of 2007.) I checked to make sure that Feb. 13th, 2008 is not a Friday (it is a Wednesday.)
It’s interesting to see how long Microsoft Japan has delayed the automatic upgrade to IE7. The English version came out in Nov. of 2006 and it’s almost 1.5 years later that the Japanese version will be pushed out to the majority of existing Japan-based XP/Vista owners. I have a hunch they’ve used this time to work with Japanese web sites/services to update Japanese websites to support IE7. Why the Japanese launch is a full 3 months behind other locales is probably an interesting story we’ll never hear from the Microsoft Japan IE team.
Just today, the IE team in Redmond promised us an IE8 Beta in the first half of 2008. So just as Japanese users are getting introduced to IE7, they’ll have the IE8 Beta to enjoy as well.
Japanese Internet media coverage of the Firefox 3 Beta 2 release.
パフォーマンスを大幅に改善「Firefox 3 Beta 2」リリース
Firefox 3.0のβ第2版が公開 - β1以降の改良箇所は900以上
Firefox 3 最新β版登場、新機能追加とパフォーマンス改善
Beta 1から約900箇所の改良が施された「Firefox」v3.0 Beta 2 日本語版が公開
Firefox 3 次期βでパフォーマンス改善、ファイナルは2008 Q2が妥当か
Mozilla，次期ブラウザ「Firefox 3」のベータ2版を公開，安定性が向上
Firefox 3 Beta 2レビュー：これは便利！な「スマートブックマーク」
(This last review covered Smart Bookmarks.)
Emumozilla-san (of the Mozilla community in Japan) blogged the release.
The New York Times Magazine profiles Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and interviews him about various aspects of his life including his computer:
It’s a MacBook, and I put stickers on it from all the conferences I attend and things I support. In Japan, for example, the Firefox web browser has this cute mascot. It’s a fox with a flaming tail, and I have those stickers.
Jimmy, we appreciate your support. Foxkeh thanks you for putting him on your laptop as he enjoys traveling the world and meeting lots of people who are interested in online culture.