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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."
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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.
Most Western Languages are left-to-right. Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are right-to-left.
Chinese can be written left-to-right, right-to-left, or top-to-bottom without any problem. Traditionally Chinese is written top-to-bottom with the columns starting at the right and going to the left, although Chinese is more and more being written left-to-right today on most web sites and in numerous popular magazines as well. You will also see left-to-right usually on things like billboards and television commercials, and almost every single television show will by default have Chinese sub-titles (even if the show is in Chinese) which will be written left-to-right, including KTV (Karaoke Television). Books still predominantly are top-to-bottom.
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...
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