Mozilla in Asia

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.

Japanese Internet media coverage of the Firefox 3 Beta 2 release.

パフォーマンスを大幅に改善「Firefox 3 Beta 2」リリース

Firefox 3のβ2リリース

Firefox 3β2、予定より早くリリース

Firefox 3.0のβ第2版が公開 - β1以降の改良箇所は900以上

Firefox 3 最新β版登場、新機能追加とパフォーマンス改善

Beta 1から約900箇所の改良が施された「Firefox」v3.0 Beta 2 日本語版が公開

Firefox 3 次期βでパフォーマンス改善、ファイナルは2008 Q2が妥当か

Mozilla，次期ブラウザ「Firefox 3」のベータ2版を公開，安定性が向上

Firefox 3 Beta 2レビュー：これは便利！な「スマートブックマーク」

(This last review covered Smart Bookmarks.)

Emumozilla-san (of the Mozilla community in Japan) blogged the release.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 がリリース

Ken over at What Japan Thinks reports on a survey of 330 Japanese people (220 of whom are working in the public sector in Japan) on the topic of Linux and open source software (OSS.)

Compared to last year, the Mac usage has doubled since 2006 and the Linux usage has tripled, but the small sample size makes the data quite untrustworthy. The vast majority of Japanese public sector surveyed this year still use Windows on the desktop as well as on the server.

Japan’s public sector still not moving to Linux, OSS - 世論 What Japan Thinks

This is in stark comparison to the Netherlands, who recently announced that the Dutch Government will preferentially use open source software and any one in the government who requires the usage of closed-source software will need to explain the necessity.   It’s fascinating and encouraging to see Europe embrace OSS even at the highest levels of government.

Earlier this week, Mozilla Japan announced a new partnership with a leading portal site in Japan, NTT Resonant’s “goo” portal. “goo” has been a supporter of Firefox in Japan for some time and a few months ago they came to us with a proposal for a new distribution of Firefox to support their “goo Green Label” search service, which donates a portion of the funds generated by the search advertising to an environmental not-for-profit. Mozilla Japan was honored to work with NTT Resonant on such a project and we debuted the Mozilla Firefox for goo Green Label last Tuesday. If you are using Firefox currently, you can try the goo Green Label add-on for Firefox in English. It involves an eco/green theme, a new search plugin, and a small tree next to the home button that grows with the number of searches you do.

Nagai-san and Sawamura-san of NTT Resonant, who were instrumental in making this project happen, were also kind enough to be interviewed about this project after the press launch (unfortunately only in Japanese.)
Firefox と仲間たち　第 3 回 永井孝久さん・澤村正樹さん (NTT レゾナント)

The Japanese press was very interested in this new partnership and drew parallels between how people contribute to open source software and how others contribute to environmental efforts or projects. We were lucky enough to have over 20 articles written about the event online and at least 3 newspaper articles as well.

IT media
Web検索するたびに“ちょっとだけ環境保護”──Firefoxに緑のgoo版

INTERNET Watch
環境保護をテーマにしたブラウザ「緑のgoo版 Firefox」公開

IT Pro
「緑のgoo」と「Firefox」が合体，検索すれば環境保護に貢献できるブラウザを全世 界に配布

IT Pro（日経パソコンオンライン）
「環境保護ブラウザー」登場、Firefoxと「緑のgoo」が連携

CNET Japan
gooとMozillaが「緑のgoo版 Mozilla Firefox」–検索バーを利用するほど環境保護に貢献

BroadBand Watch
goo、検索の収益を環境保護団体に寄付する「緑のgoo版 Firefox」

Nikkan
ＮＴＴレゾナント、「Ｆｉｒｅｆｏｘ」上での検索で環境団体への寄付サービス開始

Mycom Journal
Greenfox登場? 環境保護がテーマの「緑のgoo版 Firefox」提供へ

Mycom Journal
検索すると環境保護に貢献できる「緑のgoo版Firefox」が公開

RBB Today
検索回数に応じて樹木が成長〜環境保護をテーマにしたブラウザ「緑のgoo版 Mozilla Firefox」

Mado no Mori
goo、Web検索するだけで環境保護活動に貢献できる「緑のgoo版 Firefox」を公開

—
Kaori Negoro, Marketing Manger for Mozilla Japan, also interviewed the managers who were responsible for the Mozilla Firefox for “goo Green Label” project for the Foxkeh (Japanese) weblog.

フォクすけと行く Firefoxと仲間たち　第3回 緑のgoo（NTTレゾナント）

—
A number of bloggers in Japan who often follow the movements of Mozilla in Japan were interested in this new effort and shared their thoughts on their blogs.

Ryuzi Kambe さん

リケン★ブログーさん

Piro さん

Amigomr さん

—

Mozilla Japan thanks NTT Resonant and the goo team for what we hope will be a long-running and successful partnership to support their goo Green Label service.

For those of you who remember the Firefox Flicks contest, Mozilla Japan has been working with the artists’ network Loftwork and Sony’s video hosting service eyeVio to create a similar contest in Japan: the Get Firefox Video Award. The contest opened at the beginning of October and registration closed on Dec. 10th.

For those of you who don’t read Japanese, I’ll provide you a few links so you can get to the parts of the site that have the videos you may want to see.

The video gallery link is the fourth one on the left menu from the top. This brings you a page of all of the videos in a random order.

From the top tab, you can select also “video” or “cg/anime” which sorts the videos into those two types. Hayashi-san, who runs Loftwork, had told me to expect more computer-generated or animated videos when we were planning this contest and lo and behold, she was right!

On the gallery page, underneath the top tabs are 4 tabs (from left to right) for “random”, “popular”, “new” and “home town”. So you can sort the videos via these secondary tabs.

On each individual video page, there’s a small green box with a fox paw mark. That’s our voting button. If you like the video, please click the button to vote for it. Once you vote, you’ll be able to leave a comment on the video in the comment box. You can’t comment until you vote. We are giving away an award for most popular video so please do vote/comment for your favorite videos.

Finally, we’ll be announcing the winner of the video contest next week on December 18th at a party in Tokyo’s club Super-Deluxe. If you’re in Tokyo and would like to attend, please register from the home page.

If you’d like to promote our contest on your blog or website, please use one of the icons or blog widgets that we’ve provide at our “spread” page.

The New York Times Magazine profiles Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and interviews him about various aspects of his life including his computer:

It’s a MacBook, and I put stickers on it from all the conferences I attend and things I support. In Japan, for example, the Firefox web browser has this cute mascot. It’s a fox with a flaming tail, and I have those stickers.

Jimmy, we appreciate your support. Foxkeh thanks you for putting him on your laptop as he enjoys traveling the world and meeting lots of people who are interested in online culture.

Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia - New York Times

As web browser diversity broadens both on mobile and the desktop, web site compatibility and support of open web standards are more and more important.

In light of the non-compatibility of many websites in Asia outside of Internet Explorer, an open source software promotion forum funded by the governments of China, Japan and Korea have pooled resources to prepare a report that extensively reports on the discrepancies in web interoperability looking at the dominant browser (Internet Explorer) and the leading open source browser (Firefox.) This is not necessarily new information per se, but it is information that was compiled by web experts from China, Japan and Korea.

The foreword of the report states:

NEAOSS Forum (Northeast Asia Open Source Software promotion Forum) was formed by China, Korea and Japan governments and regional organizations for OSS promotion; China OSS Promotion Union, Korea OSS Promotion Forum and Japan OSS Promotion Forum. The Forum intends to promote Open Source Software in the northeast Asia area. NEAOSS Forum formed “WG3: Standardization and Certification Study” in order to study Open Source Software standardization and certification in July 2004. NEAOSS Forum WG3 formed subsidiary group SWG2 in June 2006 to accelerate promotion of OSS, to enhance Web interoperability between an existing proprietary browser, which currently has large market share, and OSS Web browsers. This document was prepared by the NEAOSS Forum WG3 and is classified as Technical Report type 3.

Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum Working Group 3 - Report of Web interoperability discrepancy (pdf)

Abstract: This technical report is to identify current situation of Web interoperability and to provide information to public. By figuring out and classifying the Web interoperability discrepancies, this report provides the foundation of further research.

The summary of the report states:

There are total 168 discrepancies reported in the survey. The result of this survey, however, does not reveal all discrepancies between IE and Firefox. It is impossible to gather all discrepancies because this laborious work is similar to fixing all bugs of software.

… (long list of incompatibilities)

It is important that Web developer make their Web content with opened [sic] and widely used format to be accessed by many users.

I am often asked about web site compatibility in Japan or Asia. While this report only covers China, Japan and Korea, it is a clear indication that website compatibility has a long way to go in North East Asia. As the report says, it is “the foundation of further research.”

As I had mentioned earlier in September, John Resig, Mozilla’s JavaScript evangelist, is speaking in Tokyo on Thursday at Adobe MAX Japan, and on Friday at “The Future of JavaScript” that Mozilla Japan has organized with the help of Japan’s JavaScript user group, Shibuya.JS.  Mozilla invited Shibuya.JS to Mozilla 24 earlier in September and we are happy to have their support for this event in November.  Unfortunately the talks are both sold out at this time but John will be posting his slides as he usually does.

Mobile and PC Internet usage is about equal in Japan. It will tip towards mobile I am sure. The rest of this is pretty obvious stuff. As non-PC Internet usage grows everywhere in the world, we’ll be going back to the walled gardens of the AOL-era PC Internet. Not a good trend.

The study estimated that 53.6 million people are using a mobile device to access the Internet, a figure nearly equaling the 53.7 million who accessed the Internet from either a home or a work computer in June 2007. The study was conducted among 3100 people age 15 and over.

Checking email is the most common Internet activity from mobile phones, used by 75 percent of those surveyed. Forty-one percent checked email at least once a day. Accessing news and information was next most popular with 52 percent doing so. Search and navigation queries were close behind at 51 percent.　

Time spent web browsing on mobile phones is still much lower than that spent on desktop PC’s. Internet usage on mobile phones averages 8.1 hours per month versus 18.9 hours by PC.

Adoption of web usage on mobile phones skews young. People under 34 years old account for 64 percent of mobile phone web users versus 45 percent of PC web users.

Despite these significant usage figures, consumer satisfaction remains low. Only 12.6 percent of respondents accessing the Internet via a mobile device stated that they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied”, with 52.1 percent stating that they were either “very dissatisfied” or “somewhat dissatisfied”.

Mobile Phone Web Users Nearly Equal PC Based Internet Users in Japan

This is a bit old but the Comscore numbers for June 2007 are in for Japan. I didn’t realize that Comscore has an office in Tokyo. Mozilla is listed in the “Top 10 Gaining Properties by Japanese Unique Visitors, Age 15+*” but that is driven by downloads of updates to Firefox.  It’s nice to see us in that list though.

· There were a total of 53.7 million unique visitors online in Japan in June, or 49 percent of the country’s population, age 15 or older

· Yahoo! was the most popular property, with 41.5 million unique visitors. Yahoo! now reaches 77 percent of the total Japanese online population, and averaged 33 visits per visitor in June

· The average Japanese Internet user spends 15 days per month online