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Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant
nm writes "The Mozilla Corporation's subsidiary in China has signed a deal with Chinese search engine giant Baidu. Baidu is already included as an option in Firefox's Chinese localization, but this deal formalizes the relationship between Mozilla and and the search company. Mozilla has established several other initiatives in China to help increase Firefox adoption, particularly in universities. The article notes that Firefox has seen limited uptake in China; the browser Maxthon is the second most popular after Internet Explorer. Maxthon is thought to have as much as 30 percent of the Chinese browser market."
Don't they have the same kind of deals here with Google (and thus google.cn)?
releas it as closed-source software, they'll pirate it to first place! Mod me down, but giving it a price tag will increase it's desirability in the Chinese culture.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Mou - chi Network rimited Chairman and CEO Dr. Gong ri said: "seeking open-network consistentry uphold the idea for Internet users to provide various Internet browsing choice. Firefox browser in the world occupy 20 percent market share, it personarization, customization, and other characteristics by the vast number of Internet users rove. Firefox browser and the search engine Baidu is the combination of our Chinese Web browser users with diverse services, wirr be the next Firefox browser we bring more arternative services. "
According to report, the Chinese version of the Firefox browser has built-in Baidu search, the two sides estabrished a formar partnership so that the existing cooperation more crearry, Firefox users can arso more easiry use Baidu search serviceUsers may Firefox browser Crick on the upper right of the search box drop-down menu, choose Baidu search engine, can be directry used in the search box Baidu search target information, and the great convenience to users browse and search experience.From now, China's domestic users to use the ratest version of the Firefox browser (2.0.0.10 and updated version) can enjoy the service.
I wasn't aware that the Chinese version of Firefox had special branding.
... the Chinese version of Firefox contains a module to filter subversive content?
Maxthon _IS_ IE but with a few more bells and whistles.
Maybe if they implemented support for top-down left-right layouts instead of trying to make deals with search engines, they might get somewhere.
As it stands, the Mozilla family of browsers does not support it, so why would anyone in China want to use it? Beyond that, why would you want to introduce your brand to that market before implementing that support? I can see it now:
"Firefox? Hmm, I saw that a year ago... that's that one that shows all the pages sideways, right? No thanks."
Real smart move.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Curious... This is the first time I read something about this browser. The Portuguese version of wikipedia says http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon this browser is often used to circumvent the great Chinese firewall, hence its popularity. Does anyone know why it is especially easy to do tuneling with it?
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
The WP article on Maxthon says it uses Trident, the same layout engine as IE. I know nothing about the world of closed-source Windows development, but this seems odd to me. Does MS license the source to Trident, or does it just expose a binary API for it? Since MS wants IE to win the new browser wars, what's their motivation to make Trident available to developers who might create competing browsers such as Maxthon? Does the licensing deal for Trident mean that MS gets a slice of revenue out of Maxthon's donations? Since Maxthon has a 30% market share in China compared to Firefox's 15% in the West, I assume that means that Chinese users have some very strong reason to prefer Maxthon to IE -- even stronger than the obvious reasons to prefer Firefox over IE. What would those reasons be? Does Maxthon have better support for Chinese text?
Find free books.
no way! i want to hear more, tell me about these diagonal languages plz
"Your prosecution for viewing illegal Falun Gong literature was brought to you by 100% free open source software."
I bet that would give a warm fuzzy feeling deep inside.
What's next? A deal between the Apache Foundation and the US Government, whereby Apache webservers automatically send to the US Government the HTTP fields of any request which serves up a page containing strings such as 'Iraq', 'nuclear', 'jihad' etc?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Flashget, a popular download managers made by chinese, was marked 100% clean. Now the program tries to call various servers around the world every 3 seconds. You can read it here:
http://bbs.flashget.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8723&p=31396
I do not want firefox to spy on me. Keep mozilla away from china.
This deal still won't have much of an effect on Firefox adoption in China. Why? It's simple, *all* banks in China only support IE (and IE based browsers like Maxthon) for online banking. They all have custom ActiveX controls for entering passwords and a whole bunch of other IE specific stuff. I live in China and know many people who start to use Firefox, and everything's great until they go to use online banking and find it doesn't work. Then they give up on Firefox, because it's not worth the hassle. Until this issue is addressed Firefox adoption will go nowhere.
Hey, males? Next summer, in honor of the Summer Olympics in China, let's all wear a Fu Manchu moustache.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu_moustache
Pass it on - start a trend.
Isn't Konqueror based on Webkit? If so than I would say it has corporate support from Apple. IIRC Apple were the ones to get it to pass the Acid2 test.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
You understand it backwards. Apple actually took KHTML, and morphed it into WebKit. Some of the improvements Apple made eventually did make their way back to the KHTML rendering engine, including the ACID2-related fixes. But WebKit itself is a derivative of KHTML.
And to firefox defense, although it is bloated as hell... it is for a reason(I think)- it tries to understand all the misused
and badly written HTML that exists out there.
XHTML to the rescue???
Could this be the start of a new patent paradigm? "On the internet ... in China!"
Besides, it's a bit of a ridiculous statement to assume that a significant portion of the OSS devs on Mozilla are involved or expending significant developer resources working on what amounts to a marketing deal, no? There can be other people at work on this you know.
I know I shouldn't be biting back at the trolls (a Konqueror troll, no less!) but this one was too hard to resist! You'd think someone really interested in OSS browsers would be more concerned for the rise of either WebKit, Firefox/Gecko, or both, when we're talking about the top 2 browsers in China being IE and an IE-derivative.
Ouch. Also, this strikes me as being a hit against Linux too . . . double whammy, congrats M$, what can we do? 'Cause you can bet banks are interested in where the money is, and that ain't F/OSS companies. :-(
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." - Ed Howdershelt
It's worse than that; I use the Merchants' Bank and they need you to install Windows-only binaries on your system that don't work under Wine. It's annoying, but it won't go away until more people do something about it, so call up your bank and complain.
Besides, it's a bit of a ridiculous statement to assume that a significant portion of the OSS devs on Mozilla are involved or expending significant developer resources working on what amounts to a marketing deal, no? There can be other people at work on this you know.
Every dollar Mozilla spends on marketing-related tasks is a dollar less spent on development.
Is there by any chance anything that says Mozilla got included in the deal that the Chinese end will not use their technology for either censorship or persecution of those who disagree with the party line?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Almost there.
WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Apple later released the source, but significantly delayed so now the Konqueror team had to pick between spending a lot of time reintegrating it with KHTML, or just leaving KHTML and going with WebKit. So WebKit's going to be the engine of choice in Konqueror for KDE4 (Ephiphany will be making the move as well for Gnome 2.22(?).).
The more you know, because knowledge is power...
I don't even get this. I mean, even as flamebait, I don't—it . . . it doesn't make sense.
Odd indeed. I've been using Firefox with my online banking accounts in Canada for years...from Japan! :-)
I'd say the Chinese are definitely behind the times, and I guess they don't mind being slaves of an American corporation. China, still beholden to American technology, locked in for eternity, while the rest of the world throws off the bonds of M$. Interesting.
Except for the part where it's a completely different engine and... oh, right, a troll.
i too live in china and this frustrates me.. you're fucked if you use a mac!
does obscurity really create security?.. lets ask the big wigs at M$
And the reason that it's like this in China (and a few other far eastern countries I believe) is not because they're behind the times as much as they were ahead of the times. Before SSL was standard, these banks saw the need for secure communications. So they built their own controls and rolled them out so that they could have this; at the time there was really no other meaningful option if they wanted to do secure transactions on the web. Now they don't want to give up the control because they can basically make customized desktop banking applications with those ActiveX controls and have it do more and be more meaningful than is possible with a standard web page.
Of course my own knowledge on the subject is second hand, so I advise any readers to take this with a grain of salt!
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
There are limits to Word-Of-Mouth.
In the Soda wars, about 75 years ago Moxie once nuked their marketing budget to pay for manufacturing costs, and eventually lost out to Coca-Cola.
We're having these discussions because only education/marketing can overturn things like a Chinese Banking IE Lock.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Since I've never in my life heard of Maxhon before I decided to do some digging and all Maxhon amounts to is a shell that calls IE.
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Oh really? Originally, "Maxthon" was called "MYIE2", basically a skin on IE. As far as I can determine, it DOES still use the same engine as IE. And is vulnerable to all IE exploits. Please correct me if this has changed.
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Follow the hierarchy properly next time, it does wonders for not looking like an idiot.
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I believe the main reason was due to the fact that you couldn't export encryption algorithms to certain countries from the States for a period of time. Thus there was IE and Netscape versions that had no SSL support, then eventually it was supported at a low bit (like 32bit encryption) and later fully.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why don't you click the "parent" link on my post and see what I was replying to? And then see who the idiot is.
Yes, pay triple the hardware price for the same quality (or lack thereof) you'd get on a PC. Brilliant!
The post you replied to was a reply to a -1, Flamebait comment that said Firefox was IE with a few more bells and whistles.
I don't blame you for this; Slashdot handles the threading of filtered comments rather poorly.
Schlock Mercenary
No, but if they do use the technology for censorship or persecution, they damn well better make their source code changes available!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Not Gnome 2.22. It will be available as an experimental option, but GTK WebKit isn't there yet.
Look out!
So now the proud Chinese people can more easily redirect your filthy capitalist searches http://slashdot.org/articles/07/11/18/1824230.shtml. Hurry, go buy your new PC http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/2235200 from walmart it will come preinstalled with the Communist government's favorite browser! What a deal for the Chinese! Free software for EVERYONE! At least when they pirated Ubuntu and FireFox we tried to give it to them first.
COMON JOE YOU BUY YOU BUY HAPPY FUN WEB COMPUTER! YOU GOOD CUSTOMER JOE! SPECIAL PRICE FOR YOU! AHHHH, COMES WITH SPEICAL CHINESE MAGIC OPERATING SYSTEM AND WEB BROWSER FOR FREE!
Maybe including IEtab in the Chinese version of Firefox will be a way to workaround the problem until Chinese geeks unite ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
> Firefox can either display those IE only stuff correctly
What does "correctly" mean? No-one knows, except Microsoft and they're not telling. See, this is the entire problem with extending a standard. You may have heard of "Embrace, extend, extinguish," this is the extend part. Firefox (or Opera or any other non-IE browser) can never "correctly" display IE only stuff because it doesn't know how to do that. There are no specifications, there is no defined way. What's more, if MS decides to put out IE 7.1, all the IE only stuff will have changed and FF will have to start all over again. This is a battle that cannot be won, and a battle that we shouldn't want to win.
I'm with the above commenter: the change starts with you and your colleagues. If you develop against FF, your sites will display correctly in most major browsers. Then if IE has some CSS problems, use conditional comments. This is the best solution for the time being. As for JavaScript, for most simple stuff it's easy to create code that works in all the browsers, and when you're doing fancy things, use a layer like YUI to make your code work everywhere.
then see who the idiot is
That'll be you.
Just read at -1, Nested, Oldest First and save yourself the hassle. Seriously. You can stop bitching about the moderators, too.
During a recent trip to China, I noticed that IE-only site are extremely popular in China. Lots of official and common sites (since as for banking) often rely on Active-X widgets and other IE-only features. Here in the US, people complain when, every once in a while, we encounter a corporate or government website with IE-only features. In China, it is the norm... This also affects Mac adoption there, though I imagine the lack of cheap clones is the bigger factor there.
It certainly will be interesting to see what happens if and when Linux becomes more popular. That's the only thing I can imagine detroning the huge Microsoft monopoly in China, because the Linux solutions will include a lot of home-grown stuff, and that will be seen as a big plus. I think Linux will still have a long way to go though. (My guess is that they will clone Active-X or something, assuming that hasn't already happened...)
It wasn't quite that the KHTML developers weren't getting much work done. The problem was that they spent a lot of time cleaning up their code while the Apple team just added new features. This meant that KHTML was more maintainable in the long term, but WebKit was better in the short term. The short term advantage meant that more people started working on WebKit (Nokia, etc), which eliminated a lot of the long-term advantage of KHTML.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not surprising, I couldn't be bothered to stick C wrappers around a whole ton of C++ classes either.
I don't think anyone is debating whether that's the case. Even if you couldn't give the GP the benefit of the doubt of knowing this, the last comment of the post shows that they are aware of this:
What the GP claimed was that Apple's development surely qualifies as "corporate support." Whether KHTML came before Apple's development efforts is irrelevant.
It was when you saw it. Not when I replied.
I don't blame you for this;
Big of you. Idiot.
Seriously some of Maxthons features are just awesome. I wish the Firefox team would take a look at some of Maxthons features. The way it handles tabs, bookmarks etc for Firefox 3.
Basicialy maxthon is a firefox with tabmix plug-in with the best initinal configuration for 99% of internet users. And it has some unique features such as grouping that IE doens't support( Firefox copies this idea). Once you get used to Maxthon, you don't want to switch to Firefox for limitted advantages.