Mozilla in Asia

One of the things I really appreciate working at Mozilla is the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with really talented people, such as Ian Lynam and Craig Mod.

Ian and Craig took the time and effort to put together a compelling look at typography on the web now that Firefox 3.5 supports @font-face.

View the demo in Firefox 3.5:

Thank you to Craig and Ian for a wonderful exploration of what is possible now today with @font-face and what they hope will be possible for typography on the web in the near future. Open standards and modern browsers are proving to be more and more capable and it is important for designers to know what is now possible and for browser vendors and the W3C to get feedback on what designers want in the future.

To comment on this demo, please do so at the hacks.mozilla.org post.

As some of you saw on the Foxkeh blog and the Mozilla blog, the Japan team has launched a new promotional campaign called Discover Shiretoko in collaboration with the non-profit Shiretoko Nature Foundation of Hokkaido, Japan.

The Discover Shiretoko site itself showcases four stories which show how both Shiretoko (the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Japan) and Shiretoko (the code-name for Firefox 3.5) have a number of commonalities and, as my colleague William Quiviger said more eloquently than I did,

“aims not only to inform the public about the philosophy, mission and activities of Shiretoko Nature Foundation and Mozilla, but also to make clear that the power of many can change our environment’s future.”

Please visit the site to see the stories about Firefox and Shiretoko.

To promote this collaboration between Mozilla and the Shiretoko Nature Foundation, we worked with the Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory, of Keio University to create interFORest, a site where participants can receive a banner to promote Firefox and Shiretoko on their own websites and blogs as well as see the other promoters. (Those of you who are keen will note that we worked with Dr. Kakehi’s team last summer to promote Firefox 3.0 as well.)

The interFORest site is pretty interesting so I wanted to point out a number of features of the site that are described on the about interFORest page but that might not jump out at you immediately unless you knew to look for the features.

On the home page of the interFORest site (see image above, also known as “Bird’s Eye View”, it shows a virtual map of the Shiretoko peninsula of Hokkaido, Japan):

Click through to any tree to get to the “Close up view“:

Then click on the tree again:

Also we’ve made a point to build the interFORest site with web standard technologies, specifically Canvas, which is currently unavailable in Internet Explorer. If you visit a site that is hosting a Discover Shiretoko banner with IE, you get a sad Foxkeh who hopes you will visit with a browser that supports Canvas, which would be Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

We’ve already seen a number of Japanese Internet media sites pick up the story:

「知床の自然もFirefoxもボランティアが育てる」—MozillaがWebサイトDiscover Shiretokoを開設

樹が育つ不思議なバナーで広めよう！世界遺産「知床」と「Firefox」の感動ストーリー

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、環境保護を訴える共同サイトをオープン

知床財団×Mozilla Japanによる「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーン

モジラジャパン：クリックで木が育つ　知床環境保護のネットプロモーションを開始

Mozilla Japanと知床財団は6月23日、共同で「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーンを実施すると発表した。

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、新感覚のネットプロモーションを開始

Firefox 3.5と世界遺産・知床の関係　樹木が育ち、森になるバナーをどうぞ

In addition to these Japanese media, in the first 24 hours since the launch of this campaign, we’ve had over 500 sites join our promotion, which is wonderful.

This promotion runs through August 31, 2009 but may be extended if the community deems it important to do so.

Please visit Discover Shiretoko, sign up for a banner at interFORest and help us promote Shiretoko and Firefox.

Mitcho’s presentation on the localization of Ubiquity at Tokyo 2.0 last night is up on Vimeo: Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

I’m attending the 2009 MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference.

See more photos at Facebook | Sumardi Shukor’s Photos – MSCOSCONF2009 – Conference Day 1

For some background on this event, Yoon Kit has a good overview of how far the Malaysian government has come but also has some good constructive criticism for the organizers of the event. I highly recommend his blog post at Open Malaysia Blog – MSCOSCONF.

In the morning of the first day, I gave a presentation in the Community Track. I was scheduled to talk about Firefox 3.5, Fennec and Bespin, but at the last minute I decided to change my presentation to focus on HTML 5 and web standards. I did not want to come off as just focusing on Mozilla software so I decided to re-do my presentation to this:

Open Source Powers the Open Web: HTML 5, JavaScript, and the importance of open web standards (download in OpenOffice Impress format or pdf format.)

In the afternoon, I was on a panel discussion about open source and innovation.

Can Open Source bring about your next Innovation Breakthrough ?

Panel Speakers
1.Dato’ Dr. Kamaljit Singh, GIRC
2. Tengku Farith Rithaudeen, SKALI
3. Gen Kanai, Mozilla Corp
4. Ang Chin Han, Bytecraft

MODERATOR: Dr. Raslan Ahmad, MOSTI

Download my presentation in OpenOffice Impress and pdf.

I sometimes use Slideshare, and if that’s what folks would prefer, I can upload the presentations to Slideshare but I spent a portion of my presentation slagging Flash so it seemed a bit strange to then go use Slideshare (which is all Flash.)

I’m happy to take questions via email or via comments to my blog.  Unfortunately the network connection at the conference was not as stable as I needed it to be to demonstrate some of the heavier open video demos, so if you came to my presentations, please download them to see the links to the demos I wanted to show.

In a recent post at Ken Kovash’s Blog of Metrics regarding Firefox in Latvia passing 50% market share, Indonesia was ranked at 63% market share. With such a love for Firefox, it’s also great to see that Indonesia has finally had it’s first Mozilla event last month.

Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s localizer for Bahasa Indonesia, led an afternoon of presentations on Add-ons for Mozilla at ITS Surabaya, a university in the second-largest city in Indonesia. Romi has a great write-up of the event, Mozilla Day at ITS, at the brand new Mozilla Indonesia blog.

A photo of the students

HΛniF: Hadits, Now in Firefox

Photos from the event are available at Romi’s Flickr, Aini-san’s Picasa and Kiki’s Facebook.

I would like to take a moment to thank Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s tireless Bahasa Indonesia localizer for Firefox who, in addition to localizing Firefox for Indonesians, is also working to spread Firefox farther in Indonesia. Thank you Romi!

This event would also not have happened without the support and coordination of Nur’ Aini Rakhmawati of ITS Surabaya who hosted the event. Thank you Aini-san!

Thank you also goes to Mary Colvig who provided support from Marketing/Events.

Since there has been so much interest in Add-ons in Indonesia, we would like to explore the possibility of doing a similar or related Mozilla-focused event in Jakarta later this year, after the launch of Firefox 3.5.  If you would like to have a Mozilla event in Jakarta, please feel free to comment and leave your email so we can contact you.  We are looking for people in Jakarta who would volunteer to help us with some of the organizational work to create such an event.

Here is Romi Hardiyanto’s presentation on Add-ons (in Bahasa Indonesia, not English.)

Here is Kiki Ahmadi’s presentation on the PureZilla add-on.

Thank you Romi and Aini-san and everyone who made Mozilla’s first event in Indonesia a success!

Did you know that the Philippine government funds a Linux distribution?  I did not until today.

Chin Wong, a columnist at the Philippine national daily newspaper, the Manila Standard Today, has a blog covering technology trends called Digital Life where he recently asked,

Do we need our own Linux?

Chin wrote about Bayanihan Linux, which is a Philippine government-funded Linux distribution based on Debian. The term ‘bayanihan’ itself, “refers to a spirit of communal unity or effort to achieve a particular objective.” Chin tried installing Bayanihan 3 times and failed with the comment:

All this was unfortunate, because Bayanihan 5 looks like a promising and modern operating system, that like Ubuntu, is based on Debian Linux. Like other modern Linux distributions, Bayanihan 5 also comes with a complete set of free and open source applications, including an office productivity suite, a powerful image-editing application, a media player and a CD burner. The interface, based on KDE , is a little busy for my taste, but is slick and easy enough to navigate. But do we really need bouncing icons attached to the mouse pointer while an application loads?

There is some effort at localization. Bayanihan’s OpenOffice, for example, is packed with templates of commonly used government forms. Firefox is set up with bookmarks to government and local news sites. But are such localized touches worth the effort of developing our own Linux distribution?

Chin also mentions that Bayanihan Linux version 5 came out in 2007 and that there has been no news about any updates. The website for the OS lists a forum for users but that is closed, which is ominous. He closes the post by asking whether there is a need for a Philippine Linux distribution. I’d love to know more about the customizations of Firefox that were made and how those decisions were made.

I am happy to announce that our localizer for Bahasa Indonesia Firefox, Romi Hardiyanto, is giving a presentation on Mozilla Add-ons development at Information System Department Park, ITS Campus Sukolilo, Surabaya, Indonesia on April 24th at 14:00. Similar details are at Spread Firefox:

Indonesia Mozilla Add-ons development talk – Spread Firefox

UPDATE: the maximum capacity for the event is 150 attendees.

UPDATE: the HΛniF project and PureZilla will be presented

This event is open to non-ITS students. If you would like to attend, please contact me via email (see link at Spread Firefox) or please leave a comment on this blog with your email and I will forward your names to the professor.

I would like to take this moment to thank Professor Nur Aini Rakhmawati Gunawan of the IT faculty of the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember for hosting this event and making this event happen.

As I head towards Kuala Lumpur this weekend for BarCamp Kuala Lumpur 2009, it is a good time to note that we are looking for additional contributors to help finish the Bahasa Malaysia Mozilla Firefox. We want to thank the Malaysian localizers who have contributed to date (Malay blog) but with less than half of the strings localized (look for “ms” on the dashboard), we are looking for additional devoted volunteers to step in to finish this locale. I should note that due to the queue of locales scheduled to date, we cannot promise that this locale can ship with the up coming Firefox 3.5 release but will be scheduled for some time after the 3.5 launch.

For those who might be considering joining the existing process, please take a moment to look at a number of pages on Mozilla’s wiki regarding our localization processes including, L10n:Localization Process, L10n:Home Page, L10n:Web parts, and Firefox web services guidelines, as well as the excellent blog post from my colleague Seth’s blog: Helpful Mozilla localization documentation.

The relatively new Mozilla community in Thailand is a great example of a committed localization team who came together over the Internet, pooled their strengths to work on the localization effort over a number of months, which resulted in strong demand for Firefox in Thailand. While there are any number of ways that Firefox is localized, and many amazing individuals and teams across the globe, the Mozilla Thai community is an example of a new Mozilla l10n team in South East Asia who I have personally seen in action.

If you will be at BarCamp KL this weekend, please do not hesitate to say hello or ask me about anything related to Mozilla or Firefox.

Jerry Liao at the InfoChat blog at CNet Asia shares with us his findings that StatCounter is reporting Firefox more popular than Internet Explorer in the Philippines.

Philippine Internet users prefer Firefox over IE – CNET Asia Blogs: InfoChat by Jerry Liao, Philippines: Worldwide, the most popular/used browser is Internet Explorer (IE) with a market share of 66.25, followed by Firefox with 26.62, Opera with 2.82, Safari with 2.66 and Chrome with 1.19.

For Asia, IE is still king with 74.45, Firefox with 21.04, Opera with 2.35, Chrome with 1.18, and Safari with 0.76.

For the Philippines, the story is different. According to StatCounter, the most popular/used browser preferred by most Filipinos is Firefox (51.44 percent), edging IE which has 41.85.

While I’m not yet comfortable with StatCounters’ data specifically (I need to better understand their methodology), these recent findings do line up with data from Ken Kovash back at the end of 2008.

Firefox Surpassing 50% Market Share in More Regions: What’s the key takeaway here?

Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy. For example, since our July announcement about Indonesia, we’ve seen Firefox’s share in Indonesia pick up another 7%, Slovenia 4%, Slovakia 5%, and the Philippines an astounding 13%!

It’s great to hear that Firefox is so well-loved in the Philippines. If you know of any Philippine Firefox communities, please feel free to leave a comment. Also, if there are any Philippines-based statistics services that cover browser market share (like Net Applications or AT Internet Institute (formerly xiti monitor) , please let us know about them. We’d love to know more about the Firefox users in the Philippines.

All that said, one issue that is facing Firefox users in the Philippines is that many of them (close to 20% by Ken Kovash’s count) are still using Firefox 2, which Mozilla is no longer supporting or updating. PinoyTux and Chin Wong at the Manila Standard have both been kind enough to evangelize upgrading Philippine Firefox users to Firefox 3.

Philippines: 20% are Firefox 2 Users. | PinoyTux Weblog Whatever the reason is [for not upgrading], Firefox 3 is continuously being developed and updated so users can have safer and faster browsing. I encourage users to try and switch to Firefox 3 and hopefully this time, you Firefox 3 will stay in your computer for good. I also encourage other Filipino bloggers to join in spreading the word about Firefox 3.

Manila Standard Today — Much ado about Safari 4: Last but not least, even though Firefox 3.1 is still in beta, I’ve found it fast and stable enough for everyday use—on Linux and Mac OS X. The same just can’t be said of Google Chrome or the new kid on the block, Safari 4.

In preparation for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1 3.5 later this year, we have been looking for feedback from users regarding the current beta builds and specifically feedback for the new localization efforts to date.

Kevin Miller Jr., a programmer/blogger and educator in Vietnam, was kind enough to offer help by assigning his 11th and 12th grade students in his ICT class at the American International School (in Saigon, Vietnam) to review the Firefox 3.1 Beta Vietnamese builds. Note that these students are not programmers but as they go to an international school in Vietnam, they are fluent in English and are able to provide us feedback directly.

We received 33 pieces of feedback which I have aggregated into this pdf: Vietnam_feedback.pdf. I’ve taken out real names and left in nicknames.  I’ve also reformatted the text to be a little more readable.

Looking at the feedback in aggregate, a few thoughts.

A number of comments mentioned that the 3.1 Beta seemed slower than 3.0. It’s unclear if this was due to the application or the website visited or the network connectivity at that moment. We hope to follow up with Kevin’s students once the final 3.5 is released to see if the perceptions of slowness have changed.

A number of comments discussed the frustration of having to download plugins to run Flash. I think this is a common point of frustration for average users that we may want to review.

A number of comments discussed the fact that the Vietnamese interface was confusing to those who had only used English interfaces to date. Some of the comments discussed possible other translations for menu items, which can be reviewed and debated by the vi l10n team.  Some of the comments discussed the fact that the reviewer did not know the Vietnamese computer terms due to the fact that they had only used English-language software.

It is important to remember that this particular sample is of users who are fluent in English.  While probably many Internet users in Vietnam are comfortable with English, the goal for the Vietnamese Firefox localization is for those users who are not comfortable with English or who will be getting online in the near future and would prefer a localized Vietnamese interface. Unfortunately, I think this is a common issue in locales where software has been late to be localized and English interfaces have been the default.

We would like to thank Kevin and all of his students for taking the time to review the localized builds and provide this feedback.

I’ll close with a few quotes from the students.

I am not a professional user in the internet world so I do not have any ideas about other to add in features, I just feel happy to know there will be more Vietnamese can easily go online and do research in a web browser has their own language. I hope this new version in Vietnamese of Firefox will be supported strongly by a big amount of users.

Although English is common and understandable for many people right now, it is good to have a Vietnamese version so that a wide range of people can get access to this technology without knowing English. Sometimes the English used commonly on the websites are easy, but when it comes to explaining technical terms or errors, it is very hard to understand. Moreover, it is good to see Vietnamese besides other big languages.

While using Firefox 3.1 Beta, I have no trouble and feel more comfortable than using Internet Explore[r]. The majority of Vietnamese population doesn’t know much English especially people who live in rural areas or elder people or the one who received a limited education. Thus, the Vietnamese version of Firefox would be necessary and convenient for them. I think the mother-tongue version of Firefox would be not only useful in Vietnam but is also helpful in non-English speaking countries. To perfect the version, Firefox should fix the translating problems so everyone can fully understand.

All of the localizations that are in beta are looking for feedback and we appreciate all efforts to provide feedback so that our localizations can be the most accessible and understandable in each specific locale that Firefox is released in.