Mozilla in Asia

• 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.

I’m catching up on some older info so there’s some articles from last week here but all relevant to Asia.

• Firefox 3.0.0.x Intel Mac build
• Firefox lzyc build: Firefox G4/G5/Intel optimized build for Mac OSX.
• フォクすけはクリエイティブコモンズが適用されたぬいぐるみ Foxkeh is a Creative Commons licensed plush toy
• AOL Launches Taiwan Portal: AOL? In Asia? That’s very 90’s.
• Rumor: Former Kingsoft CEO Joins Browser Company: English / Chinese
• Asia’s Fight for Web Rights: excellent Rebecca Mackinnon essay in the Far Eastern Economic Review.
• Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang says company is ‘committed to freedom of expression’
• Yahoo’s Yang: No easy answers in China Net-censorship debate

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.

Reuters has a nice profile of our Mozilla China team led by Li Gong: Mozilla seeks growth and tie-ups in China market [reuters.com]

California-based Mozilla expects the going to be tough in a country where consumers are largely unaware of open-source and businesses typically base their services solely on [Internet] Explorer, Gong Li, chief executive of Mozilla Online, said on Monday.

Mozilla Online — known as “mou zhi,” or “seek wisdom” in Chinese — now has around 4.5 million regular users in China, said Gong, who previously worked at Sun Microsystems Inc and Microsoft’s MSN unit.

“It’s going to be a challenge raising our market share to our global average (of around 20 percent), since a lot of Chinese services are constructed on an Explorer platform,” he added.

“Five percent is not enough, but it’s our target for the second half of the year,” Gong added. Its current market share in China is about 2 percent.

I was lucky to meet Li just as he was making the decision to join Mozilla and lead our efforts in China last year.  China is a tough market for Mozilla in many ways because Windows+IE is so embedded into the culture of computing, but we are growing rapidly due to our new team in Beijing.

For more information on how Microsoft changed their strategy in order to succeed in China, I highly recommend David Kirkpatrick’s article in Fortune from July 2007: How Microsoft conquered China and also a decent review of that article on Techrepublic.

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.

This year I will be focusing more on evangelism of Mozilla in Asia and so I was glad to be able to accept an opportunity to speak about open source and Mozilla in Asia at the upcoming Lift 08 Conference in Geneva, Feb. 6-8, 2008.

My presentation as it stands right now will use Mozilla as an example of open source in Asia, looking at our situation in both East and South East Asia.  I will try to address Glyn Moody’s question about the weakness of GNU/Linux in Japan, and puncture some myths in the process, but I’m not sure there is a clear answer for this complex question.

I would very much appreciate any information you may have about the success or lack thereof of open source software in Asia.  Feel free to leave me comments here.

Also, if you are attending Lift08, please say hello and introduce yourself to me.  I look forward to meeting fellow Lift 08 attendees and hope to hear from others who are working on open source in Asia.

Jasmina Tesanovic and Gen Kanai added to the speaker program