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Did Firefox market share cause major changes to online banking in Taiwan?
On February 27, 2007, Gen Kanai wrote an excellent blog post titled the cost of monoculture, which describes the state of the Web in Korea. Gen unfolds the decisions made by the Korean government that have forced computer/Internet users to use Microsoft’s ActiveX control to do any encrypted communication online.
Luckily, this extreme monoculture does not exist in most other countries, but it doesn’t mean that users are always free to choose whatever browser they want when doing things like banking transactions. Sites are still being created that require an ActiveX control to do encrypted communication.
For example, in Taiwan many people use Web ATM to do online banking. The Taiwan Review wrote an interesting article in 2005 called, “A Web of Opportunity“. In that article, they discuss the benefits of Web ATM:
“Some forward-looking local banks have introduced a new solution, Web ATM, a Web page that allows payers to transfer funds directly using a chip-stored identity card and their own card reader. Chip cards are much safer than the magnetic strip variety and as a consequence of this heightened security, Taiwan’s banks are now required to replace magnetic strip ATM cards with them.”
The problem is that all banks with Web ATM service required an ActiveX control, so users had to no choice but to use Internet Explorer.
Until now.
We recently got word that E.SUN Bank’s Web ATM became the first to support Firefox (and other browsers with the same plug-in framework) on Windows. What an accomplishment and a step forward for banking on the Web in Taiwan!
I began to wonder about E.SUN’s motivation for this change.
- Did E.SUN Bank do this because of changes in browser market share?
- Did their users demand Firefox support?
- Was there a business opportunity for them to be the first to market?
- Are they a progressive organization promoting open standards for the Web?
Regardless of the strategic motivation behind this decision, online banking just changed in Taiwan and users benefit by now having more choice on the Web.
Soon after this decision, our Taiwanese localization team contacted us to ask how we can feature and promote this new service. In this bug, you’ll see the discussion and decision to feature E.SUN Bank on pages that we serve to Taiwanese Firefox users on Windows. Staś really sums it up best with his opening remark:
“E.SUN Bank from Taiwan has done a big effort to make their website available for Firefox users. This is an important step for Firefox adoption in the region and consequently, we would like to feature a link to their website for a certain period of time on the zh-TW web parts (whatsnew, firstrun and central pages)….The important thing is to show the link only to Windows users. We would love to see this live for the 3.0.8 release.”
Web evangelism efforts like these are taking place in Mozilla locales across the globe. Without having much to do with it, I am still proud of the accomplishment and that we can shine a spotlight on E.SUN Bank for crossing that frontier. A big congratulations is due to E.SUN Bank, the MozTW team (Bob Chao, Tim Dream, and flybird), and Gen. Thank you, guys.
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New Xserve will serve AMO, IT, and SeaMonkey
The Community Giving & Empowerment program recently approved the purchase of an Xserve for community use. This resource extends our long-lasting goal of providing leveraged resources to the community. Here’s why:
- The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) editor community will use this Xserve to test extensions on platforms where some of them lack access. They filed this bug, which provides more background on the need.
- The SeaMonkey team filed a request with this bug to get more virtual machines for testing. It took us some time to process as we decided what was best and most leveraged.
- Finally, the server will be used as a place for the IT community (with AMO and SeaMonkey) to test virtualization of OSX.
Just today, I was at a conference and was asked what we mean by providing leveraged resources to our community. This is a good example. With the Xserve, we are serving many different purposes: hundreds of thousands SeaMonkey users will benefit; all add-on editors can now test on three platforms, which may result in quicker processing of the sandbox where new add-ons go before being listed on AMO; and, the IT community will use the Xserve to test virtualization.
Finally, if anyone is asking, I am still managing community requests, but at a slower pace for two reasons: community requests have slowed down a bit since we launched the program a couple years back, and localization occupies most of my time so I don’t do as aggressive outreach as I did in the past. But, we are receiving requests and I do get to them. If you’ve contacted me about a request, we will respond.
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Could a usability change to AMO increase the percentage of compatible add-ons?
I finally got around to updating my add-on that I created last year so it can be used in Firefox 3.5. After finishing the process, I was left asking myself, could a usability change to AMO increase the percentage of compatible add-ons ready for the next release of Firefox?
After going through the process, I’ll say that the https://addons.mozilla.org (AMO) team has done a bang-up job with the developer tools. Take a look if you haven’t already. I took most interest in the stats about downloads and daily usage of my add-on. Those figures have driven me to make my add-on better.
So, here is an opinion on the update experience. Without trying to be annoying, I found the compatibility update might have taken a few too many clicks into the developer tools page. Hoping to update quickly, I entered the developer tools section and then went to “Use New Tools” page pictured right below.
I actually clicked on each of the options that you see above to see how to update. Keep in mind that this is before I read the AMO documentation…someone happened to tell me I could do it through developer tools and I just went there to do it. Eventually, I was able to update the add-on by clicking on its version number (in my case it was 1.0.). From there, I changed the drop down option to 3.1b4pre. You can see that “Compatible Applications” interface below:
Now, It’s very likely that I am the problem here and not the usability of the site. Let’s not rule that out.
But, I got to thinking. It seems that updating compatibility of add-ons is an ongoing challenge that the AMO team faces during each release cycle. This MDC link shows how things have changed and users can log into AMO to update. And, here is a post that describes how addon compatibility will occur for the renaming of Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5. More and more blog posts will come along about getting ready for Firefox 3.5. It’s an important goal for AMO.
But, because I had to click around so much, I started to wonder if we should feature the ability to update compatibility more prominently on the developer dashboard. Sometimes unsolicited advice can be a bit obnoxious, but I sketched a potential change to that developer tools front page. (I also filed this bug for AMO developers to consider.) The drawing is oh-so-simple, but take a look:
My theory is that if we featured this prominently up front, then a subset of add-on developers would update more quickly in advance of each new release. I don’t know how many have zero code changes from release to release, but it’s probably a sizable number. The ability to quickly update compatibility would allow add-on creators to get their users beta testing that much faster. And, perhaps our percentage of compatible add-ons at the time of release of Firefox would go up.
I realize this update took me a while. But, I procrastinated updating the <em:maxVersion [Firefox_Version_number]</em:maxVersion> found in the install.rdf file. Naively, I thought I would have to repeatedly upload an update of my add-on to AMO every time the version number changed for Firefox 3.1 (i.e. ff3.1b1pre, ff3.1b2pre, etc.). I guess I was reading outdated documentation from Firefox 3.0 days and I didn’t know that I could update the add-on straight from the developer tools inside AMO. Mea culpa.
I thought about all this over the weekend because it’s been bugging me that my add-on is out-of-date and incomplete. Then, I learned how to update. Sometime soon, I hope to make it more complete for the release of Firefox 3.5 by preparing it for localization, creating icons that look good on a Linux and Windows, and providing appropriately sized icons for those who use small icons in their browser UI.
For reference, here is the a post I wrote a year ago about writing my addon.
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70 locales
It’s been a busy week for the l10n team. Has anyone else been following the l10n release tracking bugs for Firefox 3.5? Take a look at this dependency tree from Bugzilla showing 79 open bugs for potential locales. That’s a rough list of the upcoming locales for Firefox 3.5. Please keep in mind that this does not mean that we will add all these langauges for the upcoming release. But, I will say that we will add *some* number of those listed. In fact, just this past week, Axel added the following localizations (language, primary region, locale code) to the l10n dashboard:
- Bengali, Bangladesh, bn-BD
- Oriya, India, or
- Spanish, Mexico, es-MX
- Croatian, Croatia, hr
If the locale is building on the dashboard, it means Mozilla’s build and release team is now officially generating localized versions of that language. It doesn’t mean they are usable versions, but localizers work on translations until their builds are green. If you looked at that l10n dashboard link from above and click on ff31x in the “Tree” section , then you’ll see that we are now building 70 versions of Firefox!
It’s likely that we will also a new version of English for South Africa, Kazakh, a version of Tamil for Sri Lanka, and Assamese at some point during Firefox 3.5. Finally, we are doing active outreach and support to Swahili, Malay, and Azerbaijani. This happens primarily because of the drive and passion of individuals who are eager to translate into their native language (they’re listed above in that bug tree). But, it’s also due to some specific community folks:
- Axel Hecht
- Pascal Chevrel
- Staś Małolepszy
- Zbigniew Braniecki
- Gervase Markham
- The Release Engineering team
Now, to reel in the celebration a bit, it’s easy to get excited by these numbers, but we put in serious effort to make sure we can scale…and we’re starting to feel the pressure. Managing 70 locales across three platforms is not an easy task. Look for more blog posts from me on what we are doing to sustain this pace.
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Happy Holi
I learned today that Holi is the Hindu Spring Festival of Colors. Happy Holi to everyone, especially our friends in India and to our community members who launched this site. I was passed this to me by Tanmay, who is one of our great campus reps contributors from India.
So, why blog about Holi? In addition to it being a fun holiday, I was impressed to see the Firefox/Holi site using the Mozilla Communities logo. Gandalf and I have been seeing the new MCS community logo spreading to new sites and being used in new ways. This was really one of our goals and hopes for the project….to have a unifying element that our community could use.
Tanmay, thanks for the heads up.
community website
