Mozilla in Asia

Cheng, who runs the excellent Thai blog Mhafai.com, and is one of Mozilla’s most active community members in Thailand, writes in with an update from Truehits.net, a Thai web statistics service that tracks among other things browser share.

In April 2009, we saw that Firefox was climbing steadily at about 9% market share.

The new update from Truehits.net tells us that we are now above 13% market share, having grown from 7.4% a year ago.

The bad news is that IE 6.0 still has over 40% share in Thailand and IE 7.0 has over 30% share.  Both older versions of IE have been declining as Firefox and IE 8 have been growing, but not nearly as fast as we would hope.

The growth we are seeing in Thailand is largely due to the heroic efforts of our localization leader, Patipat ‘Keng’ Susumpow, and the community of testers and Mozilla developers, some who have been filing bugs for Thai-related issues since 2002.

We’ll be doing more in Thailand in 2009 and 2010 and would love to hear from Thai users as to what the important bugs are to fix and what Mozilla should consider doing to help Firefox grow in Thailand.  Thanks to Keng, Cheng, Art, and all of the Thai Mozilla community members without which we would not have this growing user base.

Via Sugree (and many others on Twitter) it has come to our attention that the Prime Minister of Thailand, Abhisit Vejjajiva, uses Firefox.  It’s also pretty cool that the Thai government is using Flickr too.

How is Firefox doing in Thailand?

Considering that Firefox was not localized into the Thai language until Firefox 3.0.2 in September of 2008, about half a year ago, the trends are looking good.

Firefox is solidly at 9% market share and poised to cross 10% soon if the trends hold.

IE 6 and IE7 combined still hold 86% market share in Thailand, but considering that there has been a Thai-language Firefox for less than 6 months, we should see more growth in Firefox users in Thailand throughout 2009.

This is data from truehits.net, which is a Thai net statistics company that is aggregating data from Thai websites. I don’t know the details of truehits.net’s methodologies (they claim 1.1 million unique IPs, 3 million visitors and 92% of their traffic from in Thailand) or which sites they are aggregating data from, but I’m more inclined to trust a business that is in Thailand, focused on Thai users, than NetRatings or other non-Thai services that probably do not understand the market in Thailand at all.

Thai Firefox localizer and community organizer Keng is leading an effort to get a Mozilla Thailand community site up in April.  If you would like to contribute or help, please contact Keng.

I’m really looking forward to attending and presenting at BarCamp Bangkok 2, the second BarCamp held in Thailand in 2008, and scheduled to have over 500 people attending!  I’ll be speaking about Firefox 3.1, TraceMonkey, Fennec, and our Mozilla Labs projects.  Hope to see you at BarCamp Bangkok 2!

Intel® C++ Software Development Tool Suite 1.0 for Linux* OS Supporting Mobile Internet Devices
Free IDE for mobile linux development.

OECD Broadband Portal – Press release
Data on broadband growth.

Firebug 1.2 beta for Firefox 3 RC 1
Works with Firefox 3 RC 1! Might have a few bugs but please check it out.

Q&A with Isaac Mao on tech blogging in China: Censorship, and opportunity
Isaac was very helpful when we visited Shanghai in 2007 before we opened the Mozilla Beijing office.

Cisco Systems Denies Online Censorship Role in China
Cisco internal documents show otherwise.

Cisco Leak: ‘Great Firewall’ of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers
Not surprised; very disappointed.

Cisco saw opportunity in “Golden Shield” to help fight criminals…and dissidents
Must-read from Rebecca MacKinnon on Cisco-firewall-gate.

cisco_presentation.pdf
Read and be depressed with me.

China’s All-Seeing Eye
Naomi Klein for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Open-Source File Format Is to Be a Part of Microsoft Office
Embrace & extend.

Report: JUI (Javascript User Interface) 2008 conference in Tokyo
Akky and Serkan have made Asiajin a must-read in 2008.

Firefox 3 Usability Survey
Isriya Paireepairit of the Mozilla community in Thailand would like your help with a survey he is working on for his university studies.

Metagold: A Research Blog about Nico Nico Douga
Fascinating English-language look into the hot video web service of Japan.

Economist.com Correspondent’s Diary – Tokyo food
Excellent Tokyo food blog.

Linux Foundation Opens Korean Office
The LiMoKr must be targeting enterprises or just the server market because the Linux desktop is dead in the water in Korea without support for SEED and Korea’s unique Windows/ActiveX-based encryption method.

ADDED:

.jp Registry report 2007
Lower fees, more coordination within Asian registrars, expansion of JP DNS servers, DNSSEC.  Personally, I am still on the fence with regards to i18nized domains.

• 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.

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.

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.