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."

Comments

IE is the best

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:IE is the best

[Anonymous Coward]

Konqueror already has excellent support for the rendering of non-Latin text. This is in part due to the excellent support that KDE offers it. Unlike GNOME, which has only gotten to the point of offering right-to-left text (for languages such as Arabic and Urdu), Konqueror can render left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top and even diagonal text. So it is suitable for most Asiatic languages and scripts, and even some obscure ones from Africa that are typically written diagonally.

Re:IE is the best

[Myen]

Does any actual sites with vertical Asian text exist? (BTW, it's top-down, right-to-left. Top-down left-right is weird.) Example, please!
Mozilla does lack ruby support, but that's usually used more for Japanese.

Re:IE is the best

[cyfer2000]

But Chinese people like to use such format to present ancient poems, titles and etc.

Re:google

[yakumo.unr]

It is rather odd/worrying in light of the recent article on the great Chinese firewall also being used to cripple foreign web business in order to promote Chinese sites instead (Google and Baidu being a cited example if I remember correctly)

Maxthon, Trident

[bcrowell]

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?

Re:diagonal!

[ShieldW0lf]

When designing multilinugalizable websites, you need to be able to control the text flow. There have been WC3 standards for controlling layout flow since CSS2, but IE5+ is the only line of browsers that has proper support. You need right-left for most western languages, left-right for languages like Hebrew and Arabic. In the Asian cultures, you want the glyphs to flow from the top left corner down the left side of the page to the bottom, then start a new line to the right of the first line.

Any word on rights protection?

[DynaSoar]

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?

Re:Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.