Mozilla in Asia

China’s censorship arms race escalates – Excellent coverage on Internet censorship in Mainland China by Rebecca Mackinnon.

Why and How Facebook should come to Southeast Asia – Bernard Leong’s excellent treatise on Facebook in SE Asia. If he wasn’t running his own SNS, Facebook should hire Bernard

Google Losing in China as New Users Go to Baidu – Google losing search market share in China.

Forbes: The Man Who’s Beating Google – Long portrait of Robin Li, Founder & CEO of Baidu.

Japan’s PPC ad market will reach $2 billion by 2013 – Decent, but it could/should be bigger.

E-Commerce Is Getting Chinese to Loosen Their Purse Strings – NYT on ecommerce trends in China. Ecommerce and the related Internet advertising to support ecommerce will be key to a more vibrant web in China.

South Korea Approves Sale of Apple’s iPhone – Channy has been waiting for this day for a long time

South Korea Clears Way for iPhone Sales – No one has still explained how S. Koreans are going to do anything on the iPhone that requires a secure transaction if no Korean web services support SSL.

Vietnam’s rebounding economy – V not yet for victory – Economist on Vietnam’s macroeconomic challenges.

Software piracy costs Vietnam $275 million every year – Vietnam has done well with open source software but could do a lot more.

Want to live like Commons people?
Joi Ito talks about Creative Commons, Twitter, and the White House – Guardian UK interviews Joi Ito.

This news is a week old but I saw some fascinating news on browser marketshare in China via Global Times: Chinese browsers are putting the heat on Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which once dominated the Chinese Internet world with 96 percent of the market, has seen its share shrink to 57.8 percent due to the growing popularity of domestic brands.

It’s the lowest level in Microsoft’s history in China as domestic brands such as Maxthon, Tencent TT and Qihoo360’s 360 Secured Browser now account for 31.1 percent of the country’s browser market, according to data by iResearch.

The 360 Secured Browser’s share has increased 50 percent from each previous quarter for three consecutive quarters, with its market share currently at 8.4 percent, iResearch said.

I have more questions than when I started reading this article such as:

- What is “domestic” Chinese about browsers (Maxthon, TT Browser, Green Browser, 360 Secured, etc.) that are powered by the Trident layout engine used in Internet Explorer, which is designed, developed and distributed by Microsoft Corporation from Redmond, Washington, USA?

Japanese browser wrapper providers like Lunascape and Sleipnir also claim to be “Japanese” when similarly the core layout technology of those browsers is made by Microsoft or Mozilla or Webkit (Apple/Google). There is nothing “Japanese” about those browsers except the “chrome.”

- If you add up the 57.8% that IE has, and the 31.1% that the Trident-based Chinese browsers have, you end up with 88.9% or basically 89% of the Chinese market uses the Trident layout engine.  So clearly it is still a struggle for a Webkit or Gecko based browser to gain market share in China if the majority of the web pages are probably coded for IE.  Once Trident-based browsers lose more than 15-20% share, web compatibility usually stops becoming an issue.

-What makes 360 Secured Browser more secure than other browsers? Are there real security features that 360 Secured has that other browsers do not?  Or is it merely marketing?

- What makes the Chinese users so different that Firefox is “culturally different” and therefore harder to use for Chinese users when Firefox is often very popular in just about every other country across the globe?

There is so much about the China market that is unique for many reasons, be it at the network level where the main networks in the country (China Netcom, China Unicom, Chinese university network) do not peer, or the Green Dam Youth Escort, or the Golden Shield Project. But even at the browser level, China’s Internet market is quite different than any other.

I’d welcome your thoughts on what makes the Chinese market interesting and unique and what Mozilla should do to better address the China market.

Not a lot of information.  If anyone has more details, please leave them in the comments.

Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU) search engine Sogou plans to release a web browser by the end of 2008, reports hexun.com Sohu senior vice president Wang Xiaochuan. Wang, while speaking at Tsinghua University on December 6, said that the web browser will allow students to access overseas websites for free through CERNET, instead of having to pay as they do now. CERNET (China Education and Research Network) is China’s Internet network for universities.

The end of 2008 is only 2 weeks away…

* JL MCGREGOR & COMPANY RESEARCH: Sohu Planning Web Browser

Deb Richardson’s Field Guide to Firefox 3 has already been localized into Chinese!

[精品译文] Firefox 3 新功能指南 (v1.5)

How cool is that!?!?

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.

• Mozilla For the Record – Vietnamese Language Pack FAQ
  If you are using the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox, please be sure to read this and take action.

• A failed viral ad: the Lenovo red laptop girl
  A fascinating look at a Lenovo ad campaign in China. It doesn’t look like a failure if everyone is talking about it.

• Browsers on the Move: The Year in Review, the Year Ahead
  Jeremy Keith reviews Mike ™ Smith’s presentation on the state of affairs of the web browser.

• The Mozillagumi’s 9th annual party will be held in Tokyo on May 31st. Presentations by John Daggett and David Tenser of Mozilla, Channy Yun of Mozilla Korea, Takagi-san of AIST, Nakamoto-san of OpenOffice.org, and a number of others. This event is free and open to the public but requires signup iirc.

• UCWeb, The Next Maxthon On Mobile?
  Gang Lu covers the crowded Chinese browser market.

• Top thirty cutest corporate mascots in Japan
  Self-explanatory.

• JPRS, CNNIC, NIDA (KRNIC), TWNIC have co-published a document looking at the support for IDN in browsers.

• We object to “Restriction of Harmful Information on Network Bill”
  The Wide Project, (a non-profit that works to promote the Internet in Japan), takes a stand against recent movements by the government in Japan to increase censorship of content on the Internet (a futile effort led by a clueless politician who wishes to blame the medium and not the users.)

• Baidu’s William Chang: ‘No reason for China to use Wikipedia’
  No need for any other user-generated content from outside of China, right?
• Getting Ready for the Launch of Firefox 3
  Mozilla’s Paul Kim on our plans for launch
• Microsoft: break up HTML 5
  Who benefits from this proposal? Who can’t or does not want to implement the HTML 5 specification?  Oh, you don’t say?  How surprising.

• Letter from China: Crazy English: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
  Fascinating article by Evan Osnos whom I know via the Asia Society.
• Mahalo Adds Microformats
  Firefox with Mike Kaply’s Operator add-on is an easy way to get into Microformats.
• gooスティック for Firefox | プレスリリース
  Japanese portal NTT Goo launches a Firefox toolbar.

• Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy
  “…to ensure operability on Firefox, developers had to configure their wares to support Java instead of or in addition to ActiveX — with Mac gaining compatibility as a client at the same time.” via Wes Felter.
• China vaults past USA in Internet users
  Number of users is one metric but China’s Internet advertising market is a tiny fraction of the value of the advertising markets elsewhere.
• CSS Nite in Ginza, Vol.24フォローアップ
  Kohei Yoshino’s (Mozilla Japan) presentation (Japanese pdf & mp3) from the Apple Store in Tokyo last week.
• Google Code – Summer of Code – The Mozilla Project – Project Ideas
  Mozilla projects for Summer of Code 2008.
• Nearly 20% of Mid- and High-end Mobile Devices Will Run a Linux Operating System by 2013
  Nice to see this trend.
• Firefox 3（β5）は快適♪　[Web Browser]
  Japanese Macintosh user compares Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 beta 5.
• Firefox 3 Bookmarks (My god, it’s full of stars…)
  Deb covers the new bookmark system in Firefox 3.
• The Open Source Census Reports: Summary and Participant Demographics
  Firefox is the 2nd most popular OSS library at this census of 129,000 Linux machines.
• Coding Horror: We Don’t Use Software That Costs Money Here
  Jeff on the challenges of commercial software in the face of open source software.

• Yahoo Japan embraces Silverlight for refined search experience: predictable
• Portable Firefox and the Flash Player
• Colin Charles Agenda – Chris Blizzard on Mozilla : Colin reports on Chris’ presentation at LUG Radio
• Google: We’re Going to Crush Baidu in China. We Think.
• DoCoMo Market Share Fell in March: below 50% market share for the first time in 10 years.
• Myspace launches in Korea officially: Looks challenging.