With such a move, CCB became the first major Chinese bank to support Firefox. This is very significant and positive news for Mozilla, because online banking has been the most visible area of web incompatibility problems in China. Until now, all major Chinese banks supported an IE-only solution with ActiveX-based technology, forcing users to use Microsoft Windows/IE and seriously lagging behind their international peers. CCB’s breakthrough represents just the beginning of this ground shift and we fully expect that other banks will follow suit in the coming months.

How will this movie play out? Let me spoil the plot here. My executive summary – not insider info from Google, just my own back-of-the-envelope analysis — is that (a) google.cn the service will move offshore, back to where it was. But the move has complicating factors that I will elaborate below; (b) Google will continue to sell their services in mainland China and earn revenue, but this may be negatively impacted if the pullout is not done carefully; (c) Google will keep its R&D center open, but its utility and importance is clearly diminished due to the pullout of the service offerings and the recent hacking incidence.

Now to the nitty-gritty. To understand what it might mean for Google to “pull out of China”, one has to understand what Google has inside China. It has, broadly speaking, three parts. It has the search service, Google.cn; a business team (including a sales force); and a R&D center. What Google the company has put a strong stake in the ground is with regard to its Google.cn service, and given the official statement contained in the bombshell, it does not appear to have any way out of this tangle, except for the service to move offshore, to HK for example. (Or, equivalently in search terms, just offer Google.com straight. The differences between Google.cn and Google.com lie not only in terms of content filtering but also in the other services that Google currently offer only in China – such as music search. (More on these other services later.)

How much will Google lose out by moving Google.cn offshore? You have to understand why Google brought it onshore in the first place. Back at that time, Google.com was reachable from inside China, but subject to sporadic blocking. Google figured that it needed a sufficiently pervasive presence to the Chinese audience. Otherwise, it may become irrelevant in China. Smart idea — look what happened subsequently to Facebook and Twitter – they are irrelevant in China because they are blocked early and thoroughly. Another less well known reason is that many places, especially university campuses, charged (and some still charge) students extra for international internet access. In order to reach these users, Google had to separately negotiate passageways with those gatekeepers (and often pay access fees) to make Google.com reachable from behind those walled gardens. Moreover, a local service would offer a platform to launch China focused services such as music search and download – a feature that has been often credited with cementing Baidu’s early dominance.

Moving the local services offshore now will incur less damage due to the improvement in environments. On the one hand, Google has established itself sufficiently in China such that blocking it completely will be a very testy proposition. For example, lots of university students voiced their strong displeasure during recent blackouts. On the other hand, the access environment has also improved, and internal demand will put enough pressure on the pipe owners to keep Google data flowing.

However, there is potentially serious collateral damage if this move is not done carefully, and this is perhaps why there is even the need for a negotiation in the first place and why it has taken so long to conclude. I am not talking about issues of the company’s social reputation or political standing in China. I am talking about their local services. Consider the music service, which is visible on its Chinese site but not on the US site. An educated guess says that the song rights Google has licensed are probably for mainland use only. Can they still offer these from HK or elsewhere? Ditto about map and other similarly locally acquired services. It is an option, technically, to keep these non-search services inside mainland China; however, they would be decoupled from the core search functions with much diminished user experience. It is hard to imagine that the Google brass in the US would permit such a world’s first exception for the China market. After all, these other services are loss leaders, and without the money making machine called Search, they do not have a reason to exist, corporately speaking.

More critically, Google has search partnerships with the likes of Sina.com, one of the biggest portals in China, and large mobile operators. Now, if the search service is provided from offshore and may be unavailable from time to time, would Sina (as a Nasdaq listed company) continue to rely on Google to power the search feature of its websites? Would Google be able to negotiate safe passages for such deals? Even if so, will these passages be unfiltered? If filtered, who does the filtering? And can the filtered search service still claim to be Google search? Will Google lose customers and revenue because of these factors? The deeper one probes these issues, the more complicated the situation becomes.

What about the much touted R&D center? There has been much fanfare since it was opened. It was said that Google chose to lease a separate but smallish building instead of part of a larger building because in the larger buildings Google would not be permitted to build their famous kitchen, an essential part of the corporate landscape. (Well, corporate security could be another argument, but Google is known to lease space in non-standalone buildings, even here in China.) Google’s salaries topped the previous leader in this market, Microsoft. Every (well, almost every) young and old engineer dreamed to join Google. The swagger was apparent everywhere around the Google building in Tsinghua Science Park.

From the outset, Google US was terribly concerned about information leakage in China. In the early days, Google US employees who travelled to China on business were issued blank, new laptops and were told to keep their own laptops at home. Now with the much rumored inside job, the pressure to close the lid is greater than ever. As a comparison, Sun Microsystems always had its entire intranet open to its China R&D center, except for export controlled technologies such as micro codes and hardware designs. But Oracle never allowed its China R&D center to touch core technology. What will happen now that the two companies have merged?

At the same time, the pullout of the local services also reduced the need for paying sky high salaries to several hundreds of idling engineers. What will they do? They cannot all move to Facebook as their US colleagues did en mass.

Assuming a Google pullout, where does that leave the China search market? Common wisdom says this is a win-win for Baidu, which will have the China market all to itself. That may be, for the short term. In the long term, things may not be as rosy. Not having Google as a distracting target, Baidu could become the focus of those who are unhappy about all the “Internet sins.” But more substantially, the departure of Google could make way for yet another Chinese contender to the search throne. It is often said that Baidu can beat the technologically more superior Google because it can operate the China market more effectively. This is obviously true. But by the same token, Baidu is more vulnerable to another local competitor, which can be as fierce, as shrewd, and as connected as Baidu. Words have it that Tencent – the owner of the dominating IM client QQ and since has expanded successfully into adjacent markets — is coming along with its own search offerings. And Sohu, the well-known portal, was founded to be the Google of China (thus its Chinese name — meaning search fox) and never gave up its search dream. And of course, Bing is always ready to fill any vacuum left by Google. Interesting times? You bet!

The scene in China is markedly different. Tons of websites, including commonly used ones, have been constructed and tested to work with IE6 only, without consideration of web standard (W3C), non-IE browsers (Firefox), or non-Windows platforms (Linux). This proliferation of non-standard websites is partly the result of ignorance. Remember the recent Green Dam fiasco? Green Dam was designed to block undesirable websites, but it only works if you access the web with IE. If you use Firefox, Green Dam has no effect. Another reason is financial. Contractors in China who produce websites for a living charge extra if you ask for a website that is W3C compliant or that is friendly to non-IE and non-Windows machines. Since most Chinese users use IE (NetApplications puts Firefox market share in China at 8% at the end of 2009) or an IE-clone such as 360 or Maxthon (more on that later), it seems that there is no reason to pay extra.

As a result, the Internet in China is stuck in an IE6 tar pit. Exhibit A is really ironic. Recall the latest push to have all website owners in China to register? Well, the registration website at MIIT (the ministry in charge) is IE6 only. Without IE6, you cannot file your registration information. (See reportage at http://www.donews.com/Content/200912/841eaefc655a401e9636a2603333ae6d.shtm) It would be amusing to see how MIIT responds to the latest scare over IE6 security problems. And I have not talked much about all the very publicized government push to procure Linux desktop machines for government workers, and the inability of these workers to access many of their own websites.

It is well known that online banking in China is strictly a Windows and IE6 love affair. Even open-source companies such as Sun Microsystems and Red Hat must stock their finance office in Beijing with Windows PCs; otherwise no work can be done through any of the major Chinese banks (see more at http://www.zeuux.org/philosophy/open-letter-to-cmb.cn.html). But this love affair with IE6 goes beyond these and into the arbitrary territory. In October of 2009, the province of Inner Mongolia issued a new directive that exams for accounting certificates will now be conducted entirely paperless. The exam environment is speced out clearly (http://www.esnai.com/exam/showdoc.asp?NewsID=48294&uchecked=true) – Windows 2000/2003 servers on the backend, and Windows XP Professional and IE6 on the exam PCs. You wonder what sort of accounting exam this is, because it also requires that the PCs are dual-core and have at least 1G memory. The exam system even requires 3721, the most notorious and (widely accepted as the) “original” viral software that helped shape the China Internet industry into its lawless state today.

Now let us return to the topic of IE clones. An IE clone is a software that wraps something around the IE core and declares itself a browser. Some clones offer additional functionalities while others make you question their existence.  No matter. There are about 35 IE clones that the local research company iResearch has been tracking. TT (an offshoot of QQ the popular IM software), 360 (a self-claimed “secure browser”), and Maxthon (the original successful IE clone) each take a large share of the browser market. Why so many companies do browsers? For one thing, it is cheap to do an IE clone. It has been estimated that you need about 5 people, roughly the same number of people to start a mobile phone company in southern China (if you buy ready-made components from MTK and just slap a case on it). Furthermore, you can be really lazy if you want – one very notable IE clone here simply appropriated the IE icon for its own use. (As far as I know, Microsoft has not sued.) However, the IE clone world is not all scenic, because the IE core is not open or transparent, so the wrapping around is by trial and error, and often produces problems such as sudden death. Worse, someone else (Microsoft) owns the underbelly and can do unexpected things. When IE8 came out in early 2009, there was a major crisis because the clones stopped working when users upgraded to IE8, and of course thousands of major websites suddenly became useless (http://ent.sina.com.cn/c/2009-02-20/11472383794.shtml). But that has not deterred the clone makers. After the recent Google bombshell, one of the clones shamelessly proclaimed that because IE is insecure people should use their browser instead. Sure looks like that these guys are banking on the ignorance of the Internet users in China.

In most parts of the world, the Internet has helped alleviate ignorance. That has not happened in China, yet; not to a satisfyingly significant degree, at least. This is rather depressing as John Steinbeck wrote in The Pearl – “ignorance leads to subjugation and oppression.”

The main update is that we now provide Google search (as well as Baidu) in Live Margins, and users can configure which default search engine they prefer. In Live Margins (the sidebar at the right side of the browser), if you set Google as default, then Google results will be shown. But at the same time you can simply click a button there to show results from Baidu for the same term(s) you are searching. Vice versa when you set Baidu as default.

We also updated a feature that we call (for lack of a better term) associated search. If you search in the chrome (either from Google, Baidu, or Wikipedia, or whatever), Live Margins will automatically conduct a search also, using the same term(s) you are looking for. So that, suppose you are looking for a definition in Wikipedia, you will also be presented with search results from your favorite engine. We will not duplicate search if the engine you are searching with is the same engine you have set as default in Live Margins. This associated search will occur even if you have “closed” Live Margins (by clicking the g-fox logo at the upper right hand corner). When Live Margins is closed, the g-fox turns into grey color. When an associated search occurs and “new info” is available for viewing, the g-fox blinks for a brief second and turns into bright red color. The associated search ensures that Live Margins always have up to date info on things you are searching for elsewhere in the browser.

The new version can be downloaded from mozillaonline.com or g-fox.cn. We welcome feedback on this forum or at the dedicated forum on g-fox.cn.

我们今日更新了火狐中国版，下载请到火狐中国版官方网站 G-Fox.cn 或其他各大下载网站。

本次更新主要内容是在“火狐魔镜”中提供用户可定制搜索引擎服务。继上月首次发布火狐中国版后，许多用户反映希望在“火狐魔镜”中增加搜索引擎选项。使用新版本，在呈现谷歌搜索结果的同时，用户可以选择查看百度提供的搜索结果。同样，用户在查看百度搜索结果的时候，可以选择使用谷歌的搜索服务。新版默认搜索引擎设为谷歌，使用“火狐魔镜”后，用户选择的引擎将成为下次搜索的默认引擎。

火狐中国版是我们推出针对中国用户量身定制的区域化版本， 携手众多本地顶尖互联网合作伙伴，同时支持包括微软、苹果和Linux三大电脑平台，力图为中国火狐用户和网民带来全新的浏览体验。

恳请大家在 g-fox.cn 的论坛上给我们提出宝贵意见。谢谢。

譬如说为了估算地球的重量，有人可以花几年时间在苏格兰到处找合适的山峰来做近似计算。又有学者远途跋涉从欧洲去印度观察某个稀有天象。在当时，路上要走n久，而且波折危险。他晚到了几天，没赶上，当即决定住下来，等好几年后该天象的下一次出现。结果最后回到老家时，别人都以为他早已过世。这种故事数不胜数。在过去的几百年中，早期的科学家为了了解人类所居住的世界，克服现代人无法想象的困难，付出难以置信的代价，非常令人感动。

特别推荐此书。而且一定要读原文哦。

1. The China edition (literally) creates more browsing space by providing Live Margins, a sidebar to the right of the main browsing window. Live Margins provides additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more, all at the same time allowing the user to continue normal browsing activities in other tabs. This is a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time. Live Margins gather information from multiple sources (such as typical search engines but also Wikipedia and other more vertical and focused information websites such as financial sites and weather forecast) and provide a comprehensive information feed that is more 360 degree (and not just a flat list of web links).

2. The China edition provides a number of convenience features. For example, it has a built-in button to let users easily choose the display fonts (among those available on the user’s particular system) and change their sizes. It has another one-button access to desktop functions such as Calculator and to browser shortcuts. It also enables a number of tab operations that are favored by local Chinese users, such as double click to close a tab (instead of having to bring that tab to the front and then find the little x to click on).

I strongly encourage you to try this out at g-fox.cn and also provide feedback at the discussion forum there. Note there are both a Chinese version and an English version, and we provide downloads that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The English version also has the same services targeted at users in China, so it may not bring up the liquor store in your neighborhood strip mall. Personally, I have been using this drag function as an online dictionary — try it and you will like it, no more need to open a dictionary site and type in the word.

This release reaffirms our long-held belief that our mission is to keep the internet open and freely accessible, and the best way to achieve that is to provide viable choices for people to get online and have a personalizable user experience. And the best way to achieve viability is to continue to innovate.

Moreover, one of our unique strength is our willingness, and ability, to partner and collaborate. In this release, we specifically partnered with a number leading content providers in the local market. So now you can monitor that Youku video (the Chinese Youtube) in Live Margins while keeping an eye on your regular work; you can listen to background music off the hits list provided by Sina Music. You can simply highlight a word and with a little drag motion, you can view, via Live Margins, restaurant reviews provided by Dianping (the Chinese Yelp),  artist info and songs from Yobo (the Chinese Pandora), and of course search results from Baidu. You can also access Chinese books online (provided by 17K), shop online (360Buy), and see maps and a ton of other information at your finger tips. We have had Linkool Labs as our technology partner in developing Live Margins. They have separately developed Juice, a Firefox addon in English and targetd at western (North American) users, which is based on the same basic concepts but with different UI elements and linked to a different set of web services.

The release of the Firefox China Edition is an ambitious experiment on the part of the Mozilla world. We would very much like to hear your views and experiences with this experiment. Do let us know!

首先推荐Dealers of Lightning， 作者是Michael Hiltzik，讲世界著名的Xerox PARC在70-80年代为当今的计算机行业所奠定的基础。当年PARC如日中天，首先发明个人电脑，以太网，激光打印机等等。最令人震撼的是他们的做事精神。举个例子。以Butler Lampson为首的团队，想买一台DEC公司出品的PDP机作为研发平台，因为PDP上的软件丰富。但Xerox刚刚并购了CDC，是DEC的竞争对手，所以公司上层不批准买PDP的请求，而是只让买CDC。PARC的牛人们当即决定就是不买性能低劣的CDC，而是自造一台PDP的兼容机，以便利用PDP已有的软件平台。就这样从零件开始，一步一步搭建，不仅造出了先进的设备，也造就了一群有抱负的人才。我有幸与Butler等书中角色有识，自然读起来更有一番感触。

第二本介绍的是 In an Uncertain World，作者为 Robert Rubin，律师出身，曾任Goldman Sachs总裁，美国财政部长，现任花旗银行董事长。书中讲到他个人的成长历程，值得借鉴，但更主要的更值得学习的是他如何做决策的观点，特别是在没有（也无法掌握）完全信息的情况下，如何处理危机。他在财长任中正赶上亚洲金融危机，得以大显身手。本书不仅对目前全球金融危机是及时的参照，也是一个人成长过程中的上好的养料。

最后补充一句，建议尽量看原文书。即使是非英文的外文书，也建议看国外的英译本。因为原文传达的更确切，更完整。