A few choice quotes:

But the land of ubiquitous broadband, feature-happy “smart” phones and ultra-cool computing devices doubles as a crusty regime where Linux, Firefox, Chrome and Opera users can’t bank or purchase products online, and where Mac users buy Windows CDs to prevent their devices being reduced to fashion items.

The bizarre coexistence of advanced hardware and an outdated user environment is a result of the country’s overreliance on the technology of Microsoft, the U.S. software giant that owns the Korean computing experience like a fat kid does a cookie jar.
…
Critics say the country would end up paying dearly for allowing a Microsoft monoculture to take hold, with consumers deprived of the freedom to choose newer and better products and the Web industry seeing its innovation compromised.

(Anyone want to send me a Steve Ballmer with cookie jar photoshop masterpiece? )

The article goes on to cover a lot of the issues affecting web users in Korea and how many valiant efforts have gone into trying to affect change, most significantly the 3 lawsuits that Dr. Keechang Kim has brought against various Korean policy-making bodies, without success.

The newest effort of the open web community in Korea is openbank.or.kr, an effort to push/educate banking institutions in Korea to change their practices as many believe it is these consumer-facing services which are key to making real change happen for an open web in Korea.

Mozilla is committed to supporting the Koreans who are pushing for a competitive truly open web in Korea. If there is something that we should be doing in Korea to further support open web efforts, please do not hesitate to contact me or leave a comment with your thoughts.

I, for one, look forward to a day when anyone in Korea can use any modern browser on any major consumer computer operating system to bank, purchase goods/services online, trade stocks, etc. without the need for a browser plugin.

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Over the weekend of Sept. 18-20, Seth Bindernagel and I traveled to Manila to begin to understand the Philippines as a growing community of Mozilla users.  We met various people in order to begin to understand the Philippines as an Internet market including domain registrars, network operators, social network service operators, web developers, a group of Spread Firefox Campus Representatives from a few of the schools local to Manila, and the attendees of the 2009 WordCamp Philippines event.

Dinner with the Mozilla Spread Firefox Campus Reps:

Seth has covered a lot of the information we learned from our trip but I wanted to share a few other pieces of information as well as some photos of the places and the people we met.

Chin Wong, who writes the Digital Life column in the Manila Standard met with us and provided a good overview in his article of what we are trying to understand with regards to web usage in the Philippines.

Digital Life by Chin Wong — Filipino Firefox
DO we need a Filipino-language version of Firefox? Mozilla, maker of the world’s most downloaded browser, wants to know.

Chin provided a thoughtful response in the column wherein the first response was that most Filipinos use the Internet in English, all software in English, so a localized (Filipino) version of Firefox is not necessary. But he went on to note that:

On the other hand, I realize there might be a lot of interest in a localized browser, and that there are many more end-users out there [in the Philippines] for whom English is not their first language. After all, the most widely viewed TV shows are all in Filipino, and the most widely read newspapers aren’t the English-language broadsheets but Filipino tabloids. Certainly, folks who fit this media profile would benefit from a Filipino browser.

The majority of people we met with in the few days we were in Manila were more than happy with the English Firefox, which makes sense. These are Internet professionals, web developers, bloggers, people who’s entire academic education was in English. For people like this, an English language Firefox is most natural. But considering the nature of the Philippines, where there are multiple languages in use across the over 7000 islands, where a majority of the population has yet to get online in the first place, and considering how common it is for people to use Filipino (or Taglish) in daily conversation, Seth and I came away convinced that there is a need for a more localized version of Firefox. Exactly what that will look like should be up to the Filipinos who will make that happen, but we’re looking forward to what that may be.

In the coming days, we will be launching a Filipino community mailing list and hopefully from there a website with perhaps a forum so that Filipino users and developers can start collaborating and sharing and planning what to do with Mozilla or Firefox in the Philippines.  If you’d like more information on this new Mozilla community in the Philippines, please leave a comment and I’ll email you the details once they are running.

I am also hoping to be back in Manila for the Philippine Blog Awards, which Mozilla is co-sponsoring this year.  I look forward to meeting bloggers and Firefox users at the Blog Awards event in Manila.

Here are some photos from Seth & my trip to Manila:

Makati at dusk

The infamous traffic of Manila (on a Friday night in rush hour no less)

Beau Lebens, Automattic

Seth Bindernagel, Mozilla

2009 WordCamp Philippines speakers on stage

Please Don’t Hurt the Web, Use Open Standards

Seth & Beau providing entertainment as they eat Balut. (I didn’t partake.)

Even many of the Filipinos at dinner that night don’t eat balut…

Yesterday my friend Fazal Majid, who I have known for years from his excellent blog, wrote about implementing his own local copy of Weave in 200 lines of Python.

I’ve notified the Weave team at Mozilla and they’re looking forward to meeting with Fazal and moving his code to version control so that it can be updated and shared with more Weave fans.

Thanks to Fazal for releasing his code into the public domain for reuse.

Last year Mitchell Baker and I spoke at this event which was scheduled alongside the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Internet.  Vint Cerf and Mitchell both keynoted the event last year.

If you are in Seoul this Friday, don’t miss this event as it is one of the few events which showcases browsers other than IE in Korea.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In fact, Doug had stumbled across the work of Satoshi Ueyama (Japanese), a programmer extraordinaire from Japan, who had presented those videos at the Mozilla 24 event in Tokyo in 2007.

Many people were rightly fascinated by watching the process by which a web page is laid out. Being an open source web page rendering engine, Gecko is one of the few platforms where one can modify the source code to do interesting applications such as this.

I asked Ueyama-san to provide additional information on how anyone could do this themselves and he’s kindly provided some instructions and updated his modified Gecko build for anyone to make such a video.

I have rewritten the animation generating program for the latest (FF3.1b3) Gecko / Shiretoko builds.

The updated video is available on YouTube:

First, build Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with my modified layout module, which can be found under the ‘layout’ folder in the attachment.

Then run the build to output a layout progress log as C:\mozilla-build\log\out.txt.

You can change the destination with a constant in VisualizeLogger.cpp.

This time the log processing program is written in ActionScript.

Paste part of your log file in LogSource.as and compile ReflowAnimation.as with mxmlc to generate a Flash movie.

To make a movie in MPEG format, compile CaptureDump.mxml for Adobe AIR and run it.

This generates PNG files for each frame under C:\mozilla-build\log\frames.

Now you can convert them to a MPEG movie with ffmpeg.

Sorry for my rough explanation!

A big, big thank you to Satoshi for presenting on Gecko reflow back in 2007 and again for providing an update for Shiretoko as well as the files needed for anyone to do this on their own.

If you make your own Gecko reflow video, please paste a link to it in the comments of this post. Satoshi and other Mozilla developers and community members would be interested to see how Gecko reflows your website.