Last Saturday weather was really cooperating as we held our open house — mild, breezy, and good views of Summer Palace and the western mountains from our windows.
About 40 people came, and they represented a wide spectrum of our community. There were folks from the Sun Mozilla engineering group and the Sohu user experience group, who work out of the same office complex; cool people from web properties such as Xiaonei network (the Chinese Facebook), IT168.com, and the up-and-coming financial website caibangzi.com; individual developers and activists from various Firefox communities (such as firefox.net.cn); and owners of the popular Firefox bulletin board on the well-know Tsinghua BBS (SMTH). Then there was the airplane mechanic, who confessed of not being a hardcore IT expert but offered to help with translations because he did a ton of translations of airplane repair manuals. Creative Commons China Project also attended in force, led by Professor Chunyan Wang of the People’s University.
The group surveyed the current affairs of Firefox in China and debated ways to get more people to use this browser. One major and very visible barrier is the recent insistance by (basically) all Chinese banks to implement ActiveX as part of their e-banking deployment, therefore rendering all non-IE-based browsers useless. One user complained to Bank of Beijing and got a lengthy response/excuse/explanation that is full of technical jargons and at the same time makes absolutely no technical sense whatsoever. (The letter from the Bank is posted on the net.) Many also expressed a strong belief that Chinese users prefer fuller-featured, pre-packaged browsers and urged Mozilla to consider prepackaging popular extensions. And of course someone suggested that we hold an Oscar-like annual event to give awards to best extensions in various categories.
We also spent a fair amount of time on how to get more Mozilla/Firefox documents translated into Chinese. There was the argument that some potential volunteers get scared away by Mozilla documents, which tend to be long and heavy duty, and if we were to break these down into smaller chunks, we might entice more people to help out. Well, food for thought here.
There was a preview of some of the new features from the upcoming Firefox 3, and some networking, and the session was punctuated by trips to the fridge for ice creams. The 3-hour event was partially captured on camera and some of the photos can be seen at http://picasaweb.google.com/lgatlarge (note — I did not shoot these photos).
We thank everyone who found time to visit and look forward to seeing more in the coming days. Do not forget to come to David Baron’s talk this week Sat, same time, same place, same ice creams (new ones, not left overs! 
Cheers,
Li
Posted by: lgong
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