Mozilla in Asia

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.

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.

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

• 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.

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.

Although not Asian, Chris Ilias saw a nice overview of Mozilla’s efforts by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, featuring Mozilla’s Toronto office as well as the Seneca College students who are working on Mozilla.

Both Matt Asay and Glyn Moody are pointing to this Guardian article, Can Linux finally unite Korea?, which claims that Linux will be used to try to increase cooperation between North and South Korea. While the goal is a worthy one, the devil is in the details of course.

I’ve outlined in great detail on this blog, the cost of monoculture, and update on the cost of monoculture in Korea, detailing the unique situation South Korea is in with respect to their encryption cipher used only in South Korea for secure transactions over the Internet, and how it requires both Microsoft Windows as well as Internet Explorer.

Thus, when all of these new North Korean Hana Linux Internet users decide to try to make any secure transaction with any South Korean web service which requires the SEED cipher and the Active-X control that SEED must be paired with, they’ll be sadly denied access.

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.