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.
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.
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.