Mozilla Inks Deal With Chinese Search Giant

[jacksonm]

"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."

From Slashdot...

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/12/09/0016229.shtml

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[touchring]

This part is interesting, so i guesss we still must wait for IE7.

Maxthon will also be tricky, does it support idn?

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.

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by touchring

This part is interesting, so i guesss we still must wait for IE7.

Maxthon will also be tricky, does it support idn?

No idea. I wonder if this Chinese Mozilla distro will have whitelisting enabled for com and net.

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[mgrohan]

Maxthon will also be tricky, does it support idn?

As i far as i know Maxthon is just a repackaged version of ie7.

Yes IDNs are supported in Maxthon.