Mozilla in Asia

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.

Thanks to the hard work of the Mozilla Indonesia community during the Firefox 4 launch, Indonesian magazine Gatra has featured the id-Mozilla community (PDF) alongside a review of all of the major browsers. The lead photo is from Surabaya, where Josh Aas, David Mandelin and David Anderson visited.

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

Mitchell and Tristan are interviewed at the e-G8 meeting by OWNI.

Mitchell Baker (in English)

[EN] eG8 – Mitchell Baker – Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation from OWNI on Vimeo.

Tristan Nitot (in French)

eg8 – Tristan Nitot – Fondateur Mozilla Europe from OWNI on Vimeo.

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.

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/

There are many aspects of the Internet in China that make it unique (see Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China, a page that is no doubt blocked from view in China.)

• state censorship of non-Chinese content via the Great Firewall
• internal (to China) censorship of content by Chinese Internet companies
• self-censorship that is a hallmark of any regime that does not have free speech laws

These are but 3 of the many differences of the Internet in China vs. elsewhere.

Sadly, there are non-censorship related issues around commercial software vendors and their competitive practices that are terrible for Chinese Internet users.  The most recent battle on the Chinese Internet is between Tencent, who’s QQ brand has over 600 million users of their instant messaging service, and 360 an ‘anti-virus’ software company that has 300 million clients installed and is so aggressive as to cross the line (in my opinion) of marking legitimate software as “viruses” if they are competitive with any software that 360 also provides.

If I had to put this in Western terms, it would be as if Norton/Mcafee marked AOL Instant Messenger/Yahoo! IM/etc. as virus software.

360 vs QQ, Internet security company picks fight with China’s NO. 1 software giant (the Japanese manga-style cartoons are a little disturbing)

EastSouthWestNorth has translations of key statements from QQ and a news report from MOP:

360 PK Tencent (10/31/2010) (MOP)

360 Is Hackerware (11/01/2010) (QQ.com)

China Tech News is reporting that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ministry of Public Security is now involved in this corporate dispute without any resolution to date.

Qihoo 360: Chinese Government Interferes In Tencent Internet Dispute

And today, Tencent (QQ) has issued an ultimatum to it’s 600 million users that users of QQ cannot use 360′s anti-virus software.

Tencent threatens its users with an ultimatum

China’s Internet users have so many challenges to deal with, from the state, to the companies that run Chinese Internet services, that corporate in-fighting between Chinese application providers (who are not even directly competing with each other) should be the last straw.

My opinion? If you are an Internet user in China, switch to Linux or Mac OS and get off Windows, because Chinese application providers only build for Windows and thus getting off Windows means getting rid of the need for Chinese applications altogether.  You won’t have these problems with open source software.

At Facebook’s press event today 3 journalists were given a chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg separately from the main press event. At the end of a long discussion, Robert Scoble asked Mark Zuckerberg about any future iPad app for Facebook and this is a quick transcript of what he said.

Starting around 34:20

Our view over the long term is that the development ecosystem right now is kind of crazy. I talked about this a little at Startup School, I don’t know if any of you guys were there. It’s like, when we were getting started in 2004 with Facebook, there was no question what we were going to build- er, what platform we were going to build on top of. Software development was already kind of ‘meh’ too complicated and you don’t want to make someone download something. Mobile environments were not mature enough at all. So of course [in 2004] we’re going to build for the web.

But today, if you’re going to build something from scratch, you have to build a website, but by the way now there is good JavaScript and Ajax-type interactions that work in some places but not in others so you probably want different versions of the website, then you want a simple mobile website, an HTML5 mobile website, an iPhone app, an Android app, an iPad app, a RIM app, and all these different things- and it’s insane. Something has to rationalize all this- and I think our view over time is that the HTML5 environment [the browser] that is being created across all of these [devices] should be a very valuable thing for making it so that people can build all of this.

But regardless I think that the modern app development environment is that you build apps that people use in multiple places.  It’s not just that you build a website. It is that you build a website, then you also build a mobile experience, and then you probably build something inside a social network because that is how you get a lot of exposure to a lot of users. But the more we can make this ‘all web’ that I think is  good.

If a company like Facebook sees the value in an HTML5-based web application that can run across many modern mobile devices, that, to me is a great testament to the power of the web vs. native mobile apps.  Clearly native apps have their place but the more fragmentation we see in the mobile space in both operating systems as well as devices (there are now tablet devices coming out in many different sizes from 11 inches to 7 inches an every size in between) the more important the web will be.

Scobleizer on CinchCast – Interview of Mark Zuckerberg and Erick Tseng of Facebook with Techcrunch and Financial Times.

mp3 download

Just a quick note to those who might be in Seoul this week that Mozilla will be co-sponsoring the Future Web Forum 2010 event on HTML 5 on November 3rd.  Mitchell Baker and I spoke at this event in 2008 with Vint Cerf.  Channy Yun, who leads the Mozilla Korea community will be speaking about the HTML5 support in Firefox 4.  This is the premier event covering the web browser space in Korea and we are glad to see a focus on HTML5 in Korea.

The video from the event on browser and certificates, held by the New America Foundation, The Emerging Threat to Online Trust, has been posted to Ustream (flash unfortunately.)

For those of us who know how browsers and certificates and trust works, you may not learn anything new, but I think it’s important to see how browsers and certificates are viewed by people outside of the certificate authorities or browser industries. Indeed Andrew McLaughlin, previously at Google, is now White House deputy CTO under Aneesh Chopra and spoke at the event.

I came away with the impression that it is exceedingly difficult to explain how browsers secure transactions.  Mozilla comes off better than most because of how open our processes are.  Still, browser security looks like sausage to me- you don’t really want to learn how they’re made.