Mozilla in Asia

Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation writes about the recent Linux Foundation symposium in Japan: Linux is Big in Japan — Our Symposium.

While the majority of the audience came from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia. The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University. An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.

Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan – something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to.

This statistic of the relatively high (in my opinion) participation in the kernel from Japan is interesting because it somewhat contradicts things Linus said in an earlier interview at the Linux Foundation (about the lack of participation in the kernel from Asia), which I also blogged about in January. That there is a strong contingent of contributors to the Linux kernel from Japan is a great trend and something that I think disproves the myth that “Asia” doesn’t contribute to open source.  Let’s look forward to more contributions to open source from all over the world, not just the places where OSS has been traditionally strong.

Ken at WhatJapanThinks.com has a nice English translation of a survey of 330 people I saw earlier today on japan.internet.com: Firefox 3 downloaded by 11.3% of Japanese internet population.
「Firefox 3 リリース初日に全体の5.5％が、19日以降は5.8％がダウンロード」。

The good news is that over 11% of Japanese people who are online have downloaded Firefox 3. This is a great credit to the product and all of the developers and community members, testers, and localizers who made Firefox 3 a great release. It also reflects well on the press efforts that Mozilla made in order to get the word out, be it the Guiness World Record Download Day attempt at SpreadFirefox.com, or the efforts that Mozilla Japan made to get the press and bloggers to write about Firefox 3, a sample of which is captured at Mozilla Japan’s press coverage page.

The bad news is, and I’ll quote Ken here:

However, 70.3% were unaware of the release, but after being informed of it through this survey, just another 6.9% wanted to download it, but 62.9% didn’t know, suggesting that there is quite a significantly proportion of Japanese internet users who are ignorant of Firefox’s existence.

Japan’s market share of Firefox is higher than anywhere else in Asia, but we’re still lagging far behind in comparison to Europe (where my colleague Jane Finette shares that the most recent numbers from Xitimonitor.com say that 34% of Europeans are using Firefox) or the US, where Firefox is closing on 20% market share (NetApplications).

In the first 5 months of 2008 we’ve seen very good growth in Japan, which is heartening to see, but we clearly have a lot more to do to make people aware that there is choice in browsers and that Firefox 3 is the faster, safer choice.  There’s still a lot of work to be done.

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.)

• 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

Those of you who followed Mozilla in 2007 may remember our 24 hour global community event in September, Mozilla 24.

Mozilla 24 was an amazing continuous 24 hours of Mozilla events held around the world at Stanford University, Paris, Tokyo, and Bangkok all interconnected by live high-definition Internet video (and IRC). Mozilla 24 had presentations (with video) from Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Zak Greant, Dr. David Humphrey, Mike Shaver, Johnathan Nightingale, Atsushi Shimono of Mozillagumi, Masayuki Kanda of NTT, and a panel discussion on the future of the Internet with Mitchell Baker, Dr. Vint Cerf, and Dr. Jun Murai.

In Japan, Mozilla also held a music festival (photos tagged mozilla24 at Flickr) alongside Mozilla 24, the Firefox Rock Festival ‘07 (official photos). One of the community members here in Japan, Yuji, who is a car enthusiast as well as Firefox user, decided to theme his car with Firefox and show it off at the Firefox Rock Festival which was held in Tokyo to showcase a number of awesome independent musicians including Shonen Knife, Qomolangma Tomato, Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re, SLUGGER, MARS EURYTHMICS, Midori, 101a, marron, Kokusyoku Sumire, Naoya Yoshida * APO, AJI, オーノキヨフミ, and Taizo Jinnouchi.

Yuji decided to remodel his car recently so a few folks went to take video of the car on the highway.

A 708 MB mov file of the Firefox car is also available for download.

For those of you who understand Japanese, we also have two other interesting videos at firefoxccstudio.org with musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius) and Mozilla Foundation board member Joi Ito discussing the changing state of music in the Internet age and the importance of the alternative licensing of artworks and music including Creative Commons.  Another video with Cornelius, Joi and musician Ryuchi Sakamoto also discusses similar themes.

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.