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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."
They've been making a lot of money from Google for a number of years now. Yet we've seen relatively few improvements to the browser itself. Even with tens of millions of dollars in the bank, they can't produce a web browser that doesn't leak memory left and right. Yet Opera, and the basically un-funded Konqueror, can both produce browsers that are quite a bit better than Firefox in most ways.
I used to have faith in the Mozilla project, but I've lost it over the past year or so. They just can't seem to get their act together, and put together a better browser. With all the money they have now, they should have enough money to rewrite the browser and rendering engine from scratch. That's basically the only way they'll ever deal with the 700 unclosed blocker bugs they had before the release of Firefox 3.0.
Why close the source? Just sell the thing, and spread rumors about a site where it can be downloaded for free. I'm sure the masses there are just as ignorant about closed source as masses here.