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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…

Seth and I are hosting an informal evening with some of our volunteer university campus representatives on the evening of Friday, September 18th.  We are meeting at the Food Court of Gateway Mall, Cubao, Quezon City at 19:30 on Sept. 18th.  Please feel free to leave a comment or email me if you would like to join us. (Campus reps who we are already in touch over email, no need to RSVP again here.)

If you are coming to WordCamp here in Manila, we’ll see you at the event.

Seth and I will be sharing more information about what we are learning here at our respective blogs and hope to meet more Mozilla and Firefox fans here in the Philippines.

If you cannot join us this week, I will be back in early October for the Philippine Blog Awards and hope to see you there!

Chin Wong, a columnist at the Philippine national daily newspaper, the Manila Standard Today, has a blog covering technology trends called Digital Life where he recently asked,

Do we need our own Linux?

Chin wrote about Bayanihan Linux, which is a Philippine government-funded Linux distribution based on Debian. The term ‘bayanihan’ itself, “refers to a spirit of communal unity or effort to achieve a particular objective.” Chin tried installing Bayanihan 3 times and failed with the comment:

All this was unfortunate, because Bayanihan 5 looks like a promising and modern operating system, that like Ubuntu, is based on Debian Linux. Like other modern Linux distributions, Bayanihan 5 also comes with a complete set of free and open source applications, including an office productivity suite, a powerful image-editing application, a media player and a CD burner. The interface, based on KDE , is a little busy for my taste, but is slick and easy enough to navigate. But do we really need bouncing icons attached to the mouse pointer while an application loads?

There is some effort at localization. Bayanihan’s OpenOffice, for example, is packed with templates of commonly used government forms. Firefox is set up with bookmarks to government and local news sites. But are such localized touches worth the effort of developing our own Linux distribution?

Chin also mentions that Bayanihan Linux version 5 came out in 2007 and that there has been no news about any updates. The website for the OS lists a forum for users but that is closed, which is ominous. He closes the post by asking whether there is a need for a Philippine Linux distribution. I’d love to know more about the customizations of Firefox that were made and how those decisions were made.

Philippine Internet users prefer Firefox over IE – CNET Asia Blogs: InfoChat by Jerry Liao, Philippines: Worldwide, the most popular/used browser is Internet Explorer (IE) with a market share of 66.25, followed by Firefox with 26.62, Opera with 2.82, Safari with 2.66 and Chrome with 1.19.

For Asia, IE is still king with 74.45, Firefox with 21.04, Opera with 2.35, Chrome with 1.18, and Safari with 0.76.

For the Philippines, the story is different. According to StatCounter, the most popular/used browser preferred by most Filipinos is Firefox (51.44 percent), edging IE which has 41.85.

While I’m not yet comfortable with StatCounters’ data specifically (I need to better understand their methodology), these recent findings do line up with data from Ken Kovash back at the end of 2008.

Firefox Surpassing 50% Market Share in More Regions: What’s the key takeaway here?

Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy. For example, since our July announcement about Indonesia, we’ve seen Firefox’s share in Indonesia pick up another 7%, Slovenia 4%, Slovakia 5%, and the Philippines an astounding 13%!

It’s great to hear that Firefox is so well-loved in the Philippines. If you know of any Philippine Firefox communities, please feel free to leave a comment. Also, if there are any Philippines-based statistics services that cover browser market share (like Net Applications or AT Internet Institute (formerly xiti monitor) , please let us know about them. We’d love to know more about the Firefox users in the Philippines.

All that said, one issue that is facing Firefox users in the Philippines is that many of them (close to 20% by Ken Kovash’s count) are still using Firefox 2, which Mozilla is no longer supporting or updating. PinoyTux and Chin Wong at the Manila Standard have both been kind enough to evangelize upgrading Philippine Firefox users to Firefox 3.

Philippines: 20% are Firefox 2 Users. | PinoyTux Weblog Whatever the reason is [for not upgrading], Firefox 3 is continuously being developed and updated so users can have safer and faster browsing. I encourage users to try and switch to Firefox 3 and hopefully this time, you Firefox 3 will stay in your computer for good. I also encourage other Filipino bloggers to join in spreading the word about Firefox 3.

Manila Standard Today — Much ado about Safari 4: Last but not least, even though Firefox 3.1 is still in beta, I’ve found it fast and stable enough for everyday use—on Linux and Mac OS X. The same just can’t be said of Google Chrome or the new kid on the block, Safari 4.