Mozilla Japan Steps Up Firefox Push

[Mulboyne]

Mozilla Japan are making another marketing splash in Japan. Last week saw a promotional event in Akihabara, this week will be in Mark City Shibuya and next week will by the sea in Kamakura. There'll be competitions, demos and giveaways and FG Forum regulars might like to note that a certain Mr. Kanai ("Mozilla Japanの金井さん") is quoted extensively in the press. Nice job, Gen.

[Charles]

They said Microsoft was nuts when they started giving away Internet Explorer for free, and now here's the Mozilla people giving away T shirts and hats just to get people to use their free browser. It would probably be cheaper to just pay everyone to download Firefox.

Unfortunately, I think this marketing effort is doomed. The Mozilla people are pushing when they should be pulling. The problem isn't with the users, it's with the web authors. Japanese websites are a mishmash of IE-only gadgets, mismarked encodings, defective or improper text encodings, etc etc. I see far more broken websites from Japan than anywhere else. My pet peeve is websites that use some stupid encoding like Shift-JIS but omit the markup to tell the browser which encoding is active. The authors expect that the user is viewing the page with a Windows-J IE browser that defaults to Japanese encodings. But for the rest of us, the default encoding is plain text, so our browsers render the kanji as garbage, until we manually change the encoding (usually I have to run through ALL the encodings before I find the right one).

Firefox will continue to be a disappointment to users unless web authors stop creating websites that are hostile to non-IE browsers. They'll just switch back after encountering enough frustration. I suggest the Mozilla Foundation should focus their efforts on educating webmasters and web authors in open standards (particularly in Japan) and then the users will follow of their own accord as they discover they aren't locked in to IE.

[(1VB)freels]

I think that once enough people DL the product, then they will go in and recode the software. FireFox Is tons better then IE. IMHO!

[kamome]

As an aside, I didn't know anything about Firefox until people started recommending it in the FG Forums a couple of years ago. I get most of my tech news from FG.

[Socratesabroad]

I see far more broken websites from Japan than anywhere else.
[snip]
But for the rest of us, the default encoding is plain text, so our browsers render the kanji as garbage, until we manually change the encoding (usually I have to run through ALL the encodings before I find the right one).

If "broken" sites are your bag, I'd wager you'll find far more here in China, which is far more dependent on IE.

You couldn't pay me enough to switch back from Firefox given the massive number of Chinese sites with ad-driven flash, pop-ups, and other garbage.

And then there's also the problem of encoding given the far greater number of Chinese character codes...

[Mulboyne]

Mozilla have unveiled the new Japanese logo for Firefox.



The Inquirer calls it "the little farting ferrett".

[Taro Toporific]

[floatl]

[/floatl]
The Inquirer calls it "the little farting ferrett".

Somebody ought to tease FG member GenKanai kanai.net who now works for Firefox Japan. Recently he posted about these Japanese Mozillas.

[cstaylor]

Our intranet products (time and attendance, cash register management) all require Firefox or Safari (why waste time on fixing IE's CSS mistakes and incompete DOM?)