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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.
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)
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.
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.
You're both totally confusing the spoken language (standard Mandarin versus the dialects and regional languages) and the written language (modern standard characters versus traditional ones, and modern alignment versus traditional alignment).
Modern standard Chinese is written left to right from the top row downward (like English). Traditional Chinese is written top to bottom from the rightmost column leftward. Chinese people are all used to reading stuff aligned in either way, and they are both considered acceptable.
The situation is similar in Japanese.
I am a Chinese and I was web developer. I have been using Mozilla from either M18 or M16, I am not sure if anyone still remember what's that. From my experience, non of the problems in your post exist or you've got the wrong explanation.
The hurdle of Firefox to intrude the huge market share of IE in China is the huge market share of IE. Because of the huge market share of IE, the developers in China tend to develop IE only web pages. Not only on the CSS and HTML, some of them use a lot of jscript, and IE only DOM stuff.
To win the people in China, Firefox can either display those IE only stuff correctly, or offer some other advantage that people will love to use. Both are negative for now, the developers won't add any IE compatibility for ethics (or emotional) reasons. And there isn't much advantage for Joel to learn how to use a new browser with a lot of pages can't be displayed correctly. One thing in the gray area is to develop an extension that can make Firefox read the IE only stuff.
Another factor is the MS propaganda machine in China. MS has published huge amount of documents regarding MS products, so developers' brains have been filled with MS stuff. To win the developers, Mozilla has to do something really smart.
The rising of Linux in China is a chance for Mozilla. And KHTML is some sort of "partner".
The last, but not the lest, I can't really see how this deal could improve the adoption of Firefox in China... It more likely will bring some financial independence to the Chinese Mozilla foundation, which is very good though.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
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...