Mozilla in Asia

On July 6th, we will hold a meetup for those who are interested in starting a Mozilla community in Malaysia at Marmalade in Bangsar Village 2, Kuala Lumpur, starting at 19:00.

This is a gathering for anyone who:

• might be interested in starting a Mozilla community in Malaysia
• might be interested in localizing Firefox or Thunderbird into Malaysian
• might be interested in starting a Drumbeat community in Malaysia
• is interested in open source software and or promotion of the open web

More details and sign-up are here:

http://mozmymeetup.eventbrite.com/

Note: I’ve capped the dinner sign-ups to 30 45. If we get more than 30 45 interested, please come meet us at the Starbucks right near Marmalade Bangsar after 9 pm on July 6th.

For those of you who cannot attend the meetup (and for those of you who are planning to attend), we have started a new mailing list for the community in Malaysia. Please join this list to follow the discussion:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-malaysia

I look forward to the discussion both at the meetup and online at the mailing list!

Yofie Setiawan, one of the leaders of the Mozilla Indonesia community in Jakarta, has a great blog post covering the recent Compfest 2011 event where the Mozilla Indonesia community’s efforts won Best Booth! Congratulations to the Indonesia community!

At last day we are nominated as the CRAZIEST booth. They call us crazy actually it’s kinda like the most cheerful, happy, and friendly booth. And at the final day, there’s no exhibition anymore, but the commitee ask some person from Mozilla can come at the closing day. At first I have another important thing to do, but when the commitee said that we are winning the BEST booth at Compfest 2011, I cancel my plan behind, I ride my motorbike at topspeed to the closing event, and running till get sweat to the stage. And fortunately I get there on time! Really like last seconds, the time when the host ready to calls Mozilla up to the stage to take the awards as the BEST booth at the Compfest 2011 Exhibition. We are really happy and proud of it! We’re not planning to grab any awards at first. Our mission is to present Mozilla at the event. And we would love to do it again on any other chances.

Mozilla Indonesia won the Best Booth at Compfest 2011

With the hard work of Hung Nguyen, we have had a Vietnamese Firefox since 3.6. However, Hung is working on his own and is looking for additional help to localize Firefox as well as other Mozilla software and websites into Vietnamese. This mailing list has been set up to coordinate the localization of Firefox and other Mozilla software into Vietnamese. We are actively looking for volunteers- please come help if you are interested.

If you would like to join the mailing list, please do so here:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-vi

If you prefer the Google Groups interface (same emails, different interface) you may sign up here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.l10n.vi

Note this is a moderated list because the spam to Usenet has been severe in recent years. Only spam messages will be moderated/deleted.

Thanks to the efforts of Dietrich, Arky and Chit in Myanmar, as well as the support of Mozilla IT, we now have a mailing list and mirrored Google Group to discuss and plan and work on a Burmese language Firefox.

If you would like to join the mailing list, please do so here:

https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-my

If you prefer the Google Groups interface (same emails, different interface) you may sign up here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla.dev.l10n.my

Note this is a moderated list because the spam to Usenet has been severe in recent years. Only spam messages will be moderated/deleted.

A few months late but I wanted to announce that the Philippine Research, Education and Government Information NETwork (PREGINET) has provided a new mirror for Mozilla in the Philippines.

http://mozilla.pregi.net/

I want to thank Bani Lara and the team at PREGINET for agreeing to host a new mirror for us in the Philippines.

In this case Mozilla provided the server hardware and PREGINET is providing the bandwidth, rackspace, power, etc.

If you know of an organization who can provide mirror server bandwidth for Mozilla anywhere in the world, please do not hesitate to get in touch.  We are always looking for more mirror capacity as this is how Mozilla’s software is distributed to all of our users around the world.

Pierre Equoy has been kind enough to provide an English translation of Tristan Nitot’s comments at the e-G8 event.

Jon Russell at the Asian Correspondent points us to a Bangkok Post article, Internet use increases but Thai sites lagging behind, covering statistics on Internet usage in Thailand taken from Truehits.net (a Thailand-based firm tracking many key statistics.)

For web browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controlled a 65.6% share last year, a decline of 13 percentage points from 2009. Mozilla’s Firefox increased its share from 2.7% to 15.9%, while Google Chrome rose from 8.4% to 11.8%.

Truehits also provided a list of the top 10 Thai websites which are: sanook.com, kapook.com, mthai.com, dek-d.com, exteen.com, teenee.com, manager.co.th, truelife.com, gmember.com, and playpark.com.

In a few hours I’ll be leaving for Manila where my colleague Sid Stamm and I will be celebrating the Firefox launch with the Mozilla Philippines community this Saturday April 16th.

EVENT DETAILS HERE

If you are not already RSVPed and wish to attend, please contact the Mozilla Philippines community to see if there are any extra seats. The last I heard, the event was sold out.

I’ll be doing a talk about Firefox 4, Sid will be talking about some of the new security features of Firefox 4 and perhaps what we might expect later this year from the security team.

The Philippines market is a vibrant one for Mozilla, where Firefox has enjoyed being the dominant browser on the desktop since early 2009. Recently, we are seeing a growth in the popularity of Chrome in the Philippines (yugatech.com, jozzua.com), which makes for interesting discussions- it’s something I will certainly address in my presentation.

I’m really looking forward to spending time in Manila with the Philippine Mozillians.

As promised in my previous post, the Contributor Engagement Town Hall meeting for Asia will be scheduled for Feb. 8th at 4:00 UTC/GMT as this is the time that is available to the widest number of participants. This means that it will be:

09:30 Colombo
11:00 Jakarta
12:00 Manila
12:00 Taipei
13:00 Seoul
13:00 Tokyo

We have participants from: Sri Lanka, India, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

We do NOT have participants from Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore at this time.

I’ve debated a few different ideas around how best to hold a conference call and I think Skype is the best bet as it will be free and we should be fine with the current number of participants. If you are joining the call via Skype, please be sure to mute your audio until you are asking a question. That should help call quality.

For those of you who’s contact information I do not have, namely Arpit and Ernest Chiang, please email me your contact information as well as your Skype ID so I can add you in advance of the call.

We will be using irc.mozilla.org #mozillians as our chat channel for the call. You are welcome to join the call but I will put preference on the community members who registered their availability at Doodle.com first.

If you have questions about Mozilla’s community activities or plans for 2011, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post, please join the call or irc chat in real time, or email me at gen at mozilla dot com and I’ll do my best to address as many questions as I can during the call.

Thank you and looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion.

I don’t have much to say because Chin says it better than I can.

Manila Standard Today — Firefox and the open Web — 2011/january/11

Curiously, Firefox has been the number one browser in the Philippines for a year now, even without such a measure in place.

In December 2009, Firefox held a commanding 61.57 percent of the Philippine browser market, while IE, at second place, accounted for only 25.27 percent.

A year later, Firefox was still number one, at 45.42 percent, but lost market share to Google Chrome, which shot to second place with a 36.97 percent share in just one year. IE use had plummeted to only 14.4 percent of the market by December 2010.

…

As a long-time Firefox user, I have avoided the Chrome bandwagon for a number of reasons. Even if Firefox is not quite as fast, it has a rich set of features that I have grown to depend on, including extensions that enable me to customize the browser as I see fit. Also, the latest beta of Firefox 4 is pretty darned fast—though it is starting to look a bit too much like Chrome for my taste.

Another reason I have stuck by Firefox, even through the rough patches, is that I believe in the objectives of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation that makes the open source browser, which is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web.

“As a non-profit organization, we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives instead of benefiting shareholders,” the foundation says on its Web site. “We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.”

By this definition, Firefox doesn’t even need to be number one—it just needs to be big enough to influence Web trends.

In contrast, both Microsoft and Google want their browsers to be number one because this will add to their bottom line. Both will pay lip service to open standards, but it’s clear where their priorities lie.

I want a Web that is dominated by neither company, so I continue to choose Firefox.

For those of you who want to know more about the awesome Mozilla community in the Philippines, please visit http://www.mozillaphilippines.org/