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."

Maxthon

[Anonymous Coward]

Maxthon _IS_ IE but with a few more bells and whistles.

Re:Maxthon, Trident

[Shados]

Trident is exposed as a component in windows, and is used in a LOT more things than one could imagine... less so now than a few years ago, but still. It is incredibly frequently used as a RAD renderer in memory, for one, but can also be used as a component inside other applications.

Back when I was a newbie VB6 programmer (yeah yeah i know...) I made a tiny "browser" that way. It took all of 15 minutes. There's a lot of "shells" around Trident. They're obviously not as popular as they were pre-Firefox, but back then a lot of people used those alternative "browsers", back when all web sites were IE-only.

Re:IE is the best

[Anonymous Coward]

But... modern Standard Mandarin is written left-to-right. Why is top-to-bottom support so important, again?

Re:IE is the best

[ShieldW0lf]

But... modern Standard Mandarin is written left-to-right. Why is top-to-bottom support so important, again?

Perhaps because there are 700 million Chinese people who can't read Standard Mandarin? From Wikipedia:

In December 2004, the first survey of language use in the People's Republic of China revealed that only 53% of its population, about 700 million people, could communicate in Standard Mandarin. (China Daily) A survey by South China Morning Post released in September 2006 gave the same result.[citation needed] This 53% is defined as a passing grade above 3-B (ie. error rate lower than 40%) of Evaluation Exam. Another survey in 2003 by the China National Language And Character Working Committee () shows, if mastery of Standard Mandarin is defined as Grade 1-A (ie. error rate lower than 3%), the percentages as follows are: Beijing 90%, Shanghai 3%, Tianjin 25%, Guangzhou 0.5%, Dalian 10%, Xi'an 12%, Chengdu 1%, Nanjing 2%.

Then, of course, there are all those other Asian cultures that might like to be able to browse the web too. In case half of China wasn't good enough reason.

There will be a spyware in firefox soon..

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [flashget.com]

I do not want firefox to spy on me. Keep mozilla away from china.

Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IE is the best

[ChameleonDave]

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.

Re:IE is the best

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IE is the best

[cyfer2000]

But they read the same characters. Your data are about pronunciations.

Re:IE is the best

[wizardforce]

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.

most of the memory problems are a result of supporting extensions, Firefox 3 is by now significantly better in this regard at least in my own tests. in fact, Firefox 3 is adding a number of new features and fixing a lot of the memory problems in Firefox's previous builds.

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.

you are incorrect on both counts. first, fixing memory holes/leaks doesn't require a rewrite of all the code from scratch. it probably could fix the holes in a very labor intensive way but it will also likely destroy compatibility with pretty much... everything... second, those 700 "bugs" you speak of are a lot of the time features that are desired in future versions, low level problems etc. at the start of the FF4 development there were something like 11,000+ of these in total.

Re:Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Makes me glad I use Konqueror.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:What a Quincidence!

[satoshi1]

Except for the part where it's a completely different engine and... oh, right, a troll.

Re:IE is the best

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern Chinese computer users don't give a rat's ass about top-to-bottom-right-to-left text. In fact, presenting text in columns would be quite archaic and unnatural for everyday usage. The only time I ever run into vertical text is when reading a real-life newspaper-- and even then, most newspapers have moved to horizontal text.

I'm much more proficient in English than Chinese, but I'm fairly confident that most young Chinese readers in Hong Kong and mainland China would be a little surprised when faced with right-to-left horizontal writing in a modern setting (for example, on a casual website). A parallel for an English speaker is perhaps something like running across Shakespearan English on a webpage, or watching an old, classic American movie where everyone speaks with that curious mid-Atlantic accent [wikipedia.org] that's halfway between an American and British accent.

See the Wikipedia article on text orientation in east Asian writing [wikipedia.org] for more information.

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