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Mozilla Businesses The Internet

Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant 131

Posted by Zonk from the let-the-courting-commence dept.
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."
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Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant More

Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant

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  • Don't they have the same kind of deals here with Google (and thus google.cn)?

    • Re:google (Score:4, Interesting)

      by yakumo.unr ( 833476 ) on Saturday December 08, 2007 @08:36PM (#21628219) Homepage
      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)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 )
        Why is this odd or worrying? Oh, don't get me wrong, it's certainly concerning that China appears to be using anticompetitive tactics against Google -- but that's got nothing to do with Firefox. The purpose of Firefox is to give people all over the world a great free web browser, not to prop up a specific American business. The only people who should care whether Firefox provides Google as the default search engine are Google employees.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • easy solution: (Score:4, Funny)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Saturday December 08, 2007 @08:09PM (#21628093) Journal
    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.

  • More accurate translation here (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mou - chi Network rimited Chairman and CEO Dr. Gong ri said: "seeking open-network consistentry uphold the idea for Internet users to provide various Internet browsing choice. Firefox browser in the world occupy 20 percent market share, it personarization, customization, and other characteristics by the vast number of Internet users rove. Firefox browser and the search engine Baidu is the combination of our Chinese Web browser users with diverse services, wirr be the next Firefox browser we bring more arter

  • Maxthon (Score:2, Informative)

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

  • IE is the best (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )
    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: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by 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.

      • no way! i want to hear more, tell me about these diagonal languages plz

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )
          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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Dak RIT ( 556128 )

            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 c

            • [sarcasm] What a load of B.S.!!! Next you would tell they aren't using ASCII!!??? We, all US software developers, know that 7 bit of ASCII are sufficient to represent any symbol!!! [/sarcasm]

              To be perfectly honest, seeing often how many proper asian support bugs are literally sandbagged on bugzilla, I do not see Asia to go to Firefox any time soon.

              Fact is simple: FireFox isn't native Unicode/UTF-8 application, it emulates that with best effort. But especially on Windows, since Windows knows that Fire

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Fred_A ( 10934 )

                But M-softies have no choice: Windows is sold in many markets and in all the markets IE/etc has to support all the peculiarities of internationalization.

                Maybe they do in browsers but certainly not in other apps. For example you can' type French text with the French keyboard layout. Accented uppercase characters and ligatures are impossible to obtain directly. Worst support I've seen on any platform really (those are all trivial to do in Unix/Linux and easy on MacOS btw).

                • [Off-topic] Check that [blogspot.com]. I was in similar situation with Windows + US keyboard layout vs. German umlauts. fyi.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by Fred_A ( 10934 )

                    [Off-topic] Check that [blogspot.com]. I was in similar situation with Windows + US keyboard layout vs. German umlauts. fyi.

                    Thanks. I already knew of this (or a very similar) program. Another way is to use a custom keymap (which apparently requires dev tools to generate) which is floating around and is better than the one from MS.

                    However I'm lucky enough that I don't have to use Windows for work so it's not really a problem anyway. Just a bother every now and then when I have to borrow an account somewhere (and then of course I cannot really remap the keyboard).

                    Regarding the US keyboard, I think you can switch to what is labele

              • <quote>FireFox/Mozilla is US program for US market. Not less, not more.</quote>

                Huh? There are lots of countries in the world besides the US and China. Besides, I've never had a problem rendering Japanese characters and Spanish-specific characters, which are, with English, the two languages I read the most on the web.

    • Maybe if they implemented support for top-down left-right layouts instead of trying to make deals with search engines, they might get somewhere.
      Mozilla makes a lot of cash from deals with search engines [cough google] which they can later funnel into design change rojects. Which probably includes the layout problem too.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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 t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nossie ( 753694 )
          if you didnt just read the FUD you'd also know that those 700 'bugs' include new feature requests and niggles, few to nil of them are terminal!

          ver 3 of firefox should be much better, but agreed it has been going downhill since 1.5+

        • Re:IE is the best (Score:4, Informative)

          by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Saturday December 08, 2007 @09:50PM (#21628571) Journal

          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: (Score:1)

            by jhol13 ( 1087781 )
            AARGH!

            I am sick and tired about FireFox memory "issue". I have never had any problem. Not once. I never kill FF, it is on for weeks, and memory consumption is never any problem.

            The problem with FF is that each tab is not a separate thread, quite often starting new tab will put FireFox to a halt for couple of seconds (2-5 or so). Changing that would make me much much happier than saving 100MB (or whatever) of memory.
            • indeed. RAM isn't the issue for me, I've got more than any of these programs could hope of ever using. The problem is that Firefox is sluggish but not because of a lack of RAM- it could use 10x as much and still wouldn't run out. Konqueror doesn't have ths problem, neither does Opera. a lot of the problem lies in the extensions. disabling them all speeds things up a little but renders Firefox a rather mediocre browser. Firefox 3 is a lot better at dealing with this although not all the extensions are

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by baadger ( 764884 )
            Even without extensions Firefox's memory footprint steadily increases with use. Recent evidence puts this down to memory fragmentation, not leaks. Google it and see.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

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

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 )
        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.[citat

        • Re:IE is the best (Score:5, Informative)

          by ChameleonDave ( 1041178 ) * on Saturday December 08, 2007 @09:15PM (#21628437) Homepage

          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: (Score:3, Informative)

          by cyfer2000 ( 548592 )
          But they read the same characters. Your data are about pronunciations.
        • You obviously don't know anything at all about the Chinese language, Chinese writing, or Asian languages. You're just repeating stuff from Wikipedia that you don't understand. Why are you even posting? To get your post count up?
          • You obviously don't know anything at all about the Chinese language, Chinese writing, or Asian languages. You're just repeating stuff from Wikipedia that you don't understand. Why are you even posting? To get your post count up?

            I'm posting because I've been working in the field of multilingualization for the pharmaceutical and medical industries for years now, I've worked on developing multilingual, multicurrency sites for HP Asia before to control ordering and stock control of promotional merchand

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Myen ( 734499 )
      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.
      • Sorry, my bad. I need another beer, I guess.

    • Re:IE is the best (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08, 2007 @09:35PM (#21628517)

      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.

      • Interesting, and useful information - I wish I had some mod points. Mod Parent Up!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by nairbv ( 596536 )
        I think the real change will have to start with YOU. Web developers in China should be writing code that conforms to web standards, and then there won't be "IE only code." Firefox in many cases isn't the one who is wrong.

        If Firefox changes to support non-standard otherwise-IE-only code, it will further confuse the compatibility problems. If people like you write universally compatible code designed to follow web standards, then your code will run in IE, Firefox, Opera, etc, along with other web devices t
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by FLEB ( 312391 )
            Most things, though, can be subsetted out or worked around with well-known procedures. IE-specific is often less a matter of things you can only do in IE, as a matter of not using certain notations or putting in workarounds to incorrect implementations. If anything, you end up losing functionality going from W3C to IE (so an IE to W3C transfer should lose little functionality.) I suppose there are the cases of ActiveX (which has so many alternatives as to have been a bad idea from the outset) or eye-candy l
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • > Firefox can either display those IE only stuff correctly

        What does "correctly" mean? No-one knows, except Microsoft and they're not telling. See, this is the entire problem with extending a standard. You may have heard of "Embrace, extend, extinguish," this is the extend part. Firefox (or Opera or any other non-IE browser) can never "correctly" display IE only stuff because it doesn't know how to do that. There are no specifications, there is no defined way. What's more, if MS decides to put out IE 7.1,

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tim C ( 15259 )
          What does "correctly" mean? No-one knows, except Microsoft and they're not telling.

          "Correctly" in this context means "so that it looks and behaves like it does when viewed in IE". That may well be a lot of effort, of course, and may be incompatible with correctly implementing various parts of various specs.

          If you develop against FF, your sites will display correctly in most major browsers.

          You really have to stretch your definition of "major" to include anything other than FF and IE, and even the most "FF-
      • Wasn't this the same problem everywhere else? For a long time Firefox barely had any market share with IE on top...
      • That's what the rest of the world was like circa 2000.
        Sounds like Chinese web development never went into the 21st century.
        But what happened in the rest of the world is that there was a significant user base using alternative browsers, then the companies suddenly cottoned on that they are loosing business by having IE only web site - even if it's only 5% of market it's worth fixing
        Even in the country where I live, Spain, which traditionaly has very poor web sites, 99% works on firefox
      • During a recent trip to China, I noticed that IE-only site are extremely popular in China. Lots of official and common sites (since as for banking) often rely on Active-X widgets and other IE-only features. Here in the US, people complain when, every once in a while, we encounter a corporate or government website with IE-only features. In China, it is the norm... This also affects Mac adoption there, though I imagine the lack of cheap clones is the bigger factor there.

        It certainly will be interesting to

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by 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

  • Maxthon (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by cuby ( 832037 )
    Curious... This is the first time I read something about this browser. The Portuguese version of wikipedia says http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon [wikipedia.org] this browser is often used to circumvent the great Chinese firewall, hence its popularity. Does anyone know why it is especially easy to do tuneling with it?
    • If that's true, Chinese government will probably block the download for Maxthon very soon. That will be one big bonus for Firefox since Mathon users will mostly move to Firefox. Then someone will probably write a nice addon that has the same advantages as Maxthon, if it doesn't exist yet... Firefox will be seen as "legal" by Chinese, but will always provide the same functionality if the user desires to install it.

  • Maxthon, Trident (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday December 08, 2007 @08:39PM (#21628235) Homepage
    The WP article [wikipedia.org] 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?
    • Maxthon can also used the gecko engine too. http://forum.maxthon.com/index.php?showtopic=1367 [maxthon.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shados ( 741919 )
      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 b
    • Maxthon is a browser that is basically a shell over Trident. It was developed in China so it's no surprise that it's pretty popular as it is customized to do things that IE's shell can't do.

      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?

      As far as I understand MS's motives, the more people that use their software or derivatives of their software that acclimate users to MS's products the bette

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by A Jew ( 1176261 )
      because of vendor lock-in. they want everyone to depend on windows, and for that it doesn't matter what shell people use over the rendering engine, as long as that rendering engine is closed source and windows only. they don't even have to be the ones to own and develop it, as long as it is incompatible enough with other browsers to force users to stick with windows.
    • I'm guessing that it's because:
      1. IE sucks and Maxthon is better (tabbed browsing and popup blocking and all). Since Maxthon is based on the IE engine, people can still view all their websites (with Flash, ActiveX, etc).
      2. Maxthon (previously known as MyIE2) has existed longer than Firefox. So when Firefox became popular, Chinese people are already used to Maxthon and don't want to switch.
      3. Maxthon has supported Chinese localization for a long time, possibly longer than Firefox.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SEE ( 7681 )
      Microsoft sees no particular value in controlling the browser as a browser; what they want to control is the platform represented by the browser. Whether IE, Maxthon, or something else, as long as it uses Trident/MSHTML.dll, Microsoft is the one deciding what HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. is being supported.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )
      Does Maxthon really compete with IE, or does it just help make the IE rendering engine (including all it's MS-specific quirks, bugs and features) the de-facto standard?

  • There will be a spyware in firefox soon.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ricin ( 236107 )
      "increase the download speed and stability Flashget can increase download speed from 6-10 times. It uses MHT (Multi-server Hyper-threading Transportation) technique and optimization arithmetic and it"

      Just a paragraph from their 'features' page, copied verbatim. People who believe this kind of crap deserve whatever they get.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

      Except that FlashGet isn't strictly a Firefox add-on - it supports multiple browsers, though only on Windows. But yeah, time to toss that away and switch to DownThemAll. I'll take occasional 100% processor hits during downloading over spywareering any day =)

      I'm not saying Firefox will be immune of spyware though - there have been a few spyware thingies that affect Firefox too, at least on Windows. Be careful what you install.

  • Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08, 2007 @09:11PM (#21628413)
    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.
    • Ouch. Also, this strikes me as being a hit against Linux too . . . double whammy, congrats M$, what can we do? 'Cause you can bet banks are interested in where the money is, and that ain't F/OSS companies. :-(

    • Re:Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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:Mozilla needs to be making deals with the banks (Score:1, Interesting)

      by 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.
    • And the reason that it's like this in China (and a few other far eastern countries I believe) is not because they're behind the times as much as they were ahead of the times. Before SSL was standard, these banks saw the need for secure communications. So they built their own controls and rolled them out so that they could have this; at the time there was really no other meaningful option if they wanted to do secure transactions on the web. Now they don't want to give up the control because they can basic
    • Maybe including IEtab in the Chinese version of Firefox will be a way to workaround the problem until Chinese geeks unite ?

  • Any word on rights protection? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DynaSoar ( 714234 ) on Saturday December 08, 2007 @11:12PM (#21628849) Journal
    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?
    • No, but if they do use the technology for censorship or persecution, they damn well better make their source code changes available!
  • So now the proud Chinese people can more easily redirect your filthy capitalist searches http://slashdot.org/articles/07/11/18/1824230.shtml [slashdot.org]. Hurry, go buy your new PC http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/2235200 [slashdot.org] from walmart it will come preinstalled with the Communist government's favorite browser! What a deal for the Chinese! Free software for EVERYONE! At least when they pirated Ubuntu and FireFox we tried to give it to them first.

    COMON JOE YOU BUY YOU BUY HAPPY FUN WEB COMPUTER! YO
  • Basicialy maxthon is a firefox with tabmix plug-in with the best initinal configuration for 99% of internet users. And it has some unique features such as grouping that IE doens't support( Firefox copies this idea). Once you get used to Maxthon, you don't want to switch to Firefox for limitted advantages.

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