Mozilla in Asia

• Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation)
  Video of Mitchell’s presentation on Mozilla Fennec and our plans for the web on mobile devices.
• Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky (NYU ITP)
  Clay Shirky talks about the impact of the change to society with how groups are using the Internet. Lightly edited speech transcript at Clay’s book blog.
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization
  Clay’s presentation video, Feb. 2008 at Berkman.
• Antonio Gomes on MicroB, Nokia tablets’ Firefox
  Antonio interviewed about the Mozilla-based browser that is on the Nokia N800 series.
• ./iake: 75 | จงระวัง พลังด้านมืดจะครอบงำทุกสิ่ง!
  Minefield Thai test.

• 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.

The Thai community of Firefox localizers is very busy these days.

Last week they held a localization party called “House 2.0” where they worked to finalize most of the localization needed for the upcoming Thai Firefox release. This is very similar to the German Mozilla community who recently also held a “Hack’n'Cook” event. I am looking forward to the Thai locale release.

UPDATE: Molecularck has an overview of the House 2.0 Firefox Thai l10n sprint and blognone has a nice overview in Thai Firefox 3 Thai localization sprint วันที่ 2 และ 3

Firefox Thai Locale!, originally uploaded by pittaya.

1st Thai Firefox 3 on GNU/Linux (very pre-release), originally uploaded by arthit.

Firefox 3 Thai Langpack pre-alpha 1, originally uploaded by kengz.

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.

Isriya Paireepairit (a.k.a. markpeak) Patipat Susumpow (a.k.a. keng) and Arthit Suriyawongkul (a.k.a. bact), are among the Mozilla community members in Thailand who are working to finalize Thai language support in Firefox. They recently held a bugday at the end of March and pittaya has some photos up on Flickr.  I see there are still some bugs open before we can launch a Thai localization but I’m hoping we can do so soon.

Update: Chakrad Chalayut has a great overview of the bug day here BugAThon at coffee world Silom Rd., and in Thai as well BugAThon ที่ coffee world สีลม.

Via flors I see that Ari Jaaksi, a Vice President of Software at Nokia, recently presented on “What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help” at OSiM USA 2008. Jaaksi’s presentation is also available in pdf and Podshow is also providing an mp3. I recommend the mp3 audio as the presentation is largely images.

Jaaksi’s presentation is very relevant to Mozilla because Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet ships with Maemo Linux as the operating system and Mozilla’s Gecko is used as the rendering engine for the Maemo Browser.  I know from recent discussions with Christian Sejersen and Jay Sullivan of Mozilla’s mobile team that Mozilla very much values Nokia’s participation in the Mozilla project.

Jaaksi’s presentation touched on these points:

• Linux and open source CAN meet the needs of mass-market.
• [Nokia’s] role: bring open source to mainstream consumer electronics
• [Nokia & open source] need to learn from each other. Both.
• Building upstream. Community rules.
• Beyond code and licenses: developers and projects.
• Diving in: deeper involvement.

While the entire presentation was worth reviewing, starting around 16:40 in Jaaksi’s presentation are some interesting and insightful comments about Nokia and working in open source. In response to a question about whether Nokia contributed patches back to Webkit around the implementation of Webkit in Nokia’s S60 platform, Jaaksi was open and honest and said that Nokia did not do enough in that instance.  He then went on to say that Nokia plans to work more closely with the open source projects they are shipping code from in the future.

Note: when Jaaksi talks about the ‘upstream model’ what he means to say is contributing patches regularly back to the original project’s codebase. I’ve also added in some clarification in brackets in the transcription below to make it more clear as to what exactly Jaaksi is referring to.

Question from the audience (@ 16:20): Excuse me, another question. If I remember correctly, it was 3 years ago when you [Nokia] implemented Webkit in to the Series 60 devices, you had to make a lot changes, for example in memory management. Did you use the ‘upstream model’ in that case?  I mean, did you feed back to the community the changes you had made for your devices?

Answer from Ari Jaaksi:  Not the way we [Nokia] should have done it.  Let me be very honest about that. Also with our Internet tablets we have horror stories where we didn’t do it [share patches back with the trunk]. Just today, or yesterday I discussed this with the Mozilla guy, the name escapes me at the moment, I don’t know if he is here today, about our Mozilla browser here. It is really that, what we did was last summer when we started to ship with the Mozilla browser we made a couple of mistakes. We are kind of working upstream there [with Mozilla] but we are not doing as much as I would like to do and we sort of need to go back. We almost forked the code [from Mozilla] but we need to go back [to sync up with the main Gecko 1.9 trunk].

Also in the [Webkit] browser on the Series 60 devices, I claim that the Webkit situation is not a trivial case. There are… Apple forked it.  We [Nokia] kind of forked it. There are some challenges now [due to the forking of code from the Webkit trunk]. This is something that we as an industry should learn [not to do]. This [forking code] is not benefitting anybody if we do it like that. That is kind of my message here.  Good question.

I, for one, am very glad to see Nokia using open source, and it’s clear from Jaaksi’s presentation and comments that while Nokia has had some challenges in developing with open source code, they are learning how better to work with open source communities (like Mozilla) to provide innovative products to Nokia’s customers.  It’s great to hear that Nokia plans to sync back with the core Gecko code base as Nokia (and the users of the Nokia products that will ship with Gecko) will get all the benefits that the entire Mozilla community is working on for the current version of Gecko 1.9 and beyond.

Thank you to Ari Jaaksi and the entire Nokia open source development team for their hard work and efforts.  We look forward to your future products, especially those made with OSS and especially Mozilla.

Last week Mozilla Labs GM Chris Beard was in Tokyo to present on the his view of the future of the web at ZDNet Japan’s builder tech day - open API & beyond event and the (Japan) Open Source Conference 2008 Spring.

Chris gave a presentation introducing Mozilla Labs, which was the first presentation of the Labs projects (Prism, Weave, Personas, etc.) in Japan.  Chris’s presentation was basically only images, and I don’t think we have video anywhere (unfortunately) so we’ll have to wait for the next Labs presentation for something people can download.  You can see most of the screenshots of the presentations in the photo galleries linked below.

News coverage:

• weaveでブラウザとWebサービスの融合を図るMozilla–builder tech day
• 【OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring】「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」—Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”：ITpro
• 「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」、Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”
• Mozilla Labsのトップが語る次世代ブラウザの姿 (go to the second page and click on the photo of amachang and Chris at the bottom)

Blog comments

• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Tokyo/Spring 1日目報告 - SumiTomohikoの日記
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008(OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring)に行ってきました(1日目) - RX-7乗りの適当な日々
  
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Spring/Tokyo - なかむランチ
• OSC2008に行ってきた。 - 「 Firefox ×？＝！」を考えてみる、ブログ。
• Mozilla LabのChris Beard氏のお話 - ウィリアムのいたずらの開発日記
• OSC2008 での Chris Beard のキーノートスピーチ - えむもじら

Photo galleries:

• OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring
• Kazabana - 2008-02-29~03
• Open Source Conference Tokyo
• Mozilla Labs at Open Source Conference Tokyo 2008

Many thanks to Chris for coming out to Tokyo and thank you to all of the Mozillagumi volunteers for helping staff the booth and prepare the user questionnaire.  Thank you to CNet Japan for hosting and Six Apart Japan, Seki-san, David Recordon & Miyagawa-san for the initial event planning.

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.

Of the mobile phone network providers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo (Wikipedia) is the largest provider and has the broadest mobile network in Japan.  DoCoMo provides Internet access services for those people who require PC-based wireless broadband access to the Internet via DoCoMo’s ‘mopera U‘ subsidiary.

Last week NTT DoCoMo’s mopera U annouced an add on for Mozilla Thunderbird which configures Thunderbird with the settings for mopera U.  The user only needs to know their email address and password (the tool configures the other server/proxy/smtp/etc. information.)

「Thunderbirdアカウント設定ツール」

Another major ISP in Japan, IIJ, has been distributing a customized Thunderbird for their users since 2006.

While the popularity of webmail is clear, there will always be a need for a mail client and I (and the many loyal Thunderbird uses in Japan) look forward to the actions of the new Mozilla Messaging organization.

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.