Firefox on fire in Thailand
Gen Kanai
I'm wondering if you can help me.
Mozilla is seeing a significant growth in Firefox users in Thailand in
the past 3 months. Around 17% growth, which is one of the highest
rates.
I know this is partly due to the hard work of the Thai Firefox
localizing team but do you know if there is another reason why Firefox
is particularly popular in Thailand right now? We are trying to find
out if there are any Internet trends in Thailand that we do not know
about.
My colleague Ken Kovash is cc'd to this email so if you have any
thoughts, please reply to the group and cc Ken.
Thank you in advance,
31o5 OHIRA
http://www.newsclip.be/news/2009619_024275.html (sorry it's in Japanese)
I remember few years (or months?) back it used to be pantip.com, sanook, msn etc. wasn't it? Most of the websites were just for IE when I first came to Thailand which is 5++ years back, not much easy CMSs to generate clean code, not much blogs, I used to felt Thai people like chatting more than blogging, but now I see many people blogging.
Maybe I feel this because I didn't know much Thai techies when I first came here, but somehow I've been feeling something has been happening here in Thailand + SE Asia... excited, I'm kind of lucky to live here during this period :)
satoko
Jan
replies:
"It may relate to internet censorship in Thailand, I heard from many
ppl those change to FF after they can't access many sites via IE."
http://twitter.com/jiew/statuses/2248648604
"foxyproxy and tor"
http://twitter.com/sugree/statuses/2248689363
if that is true that would be the first positive thing i hear about
censorship :)
On Jun 20, 10:23 am, 31o5 OHIRA <3105.oh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if it's related, but I saw a news about internet trend in
Jan
when many more websites can friendly open with Firefox. I guess."
http://twitter.com/jiew/statuses/2248747490
On Jun 20, 11:05 am, Jan <tonsai.me...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> probably a couple of reasons. i asked the twitter brain and got some
> replies:
>
> "It may relate to internet censorship in Thailand, I heard from many
> ppl those change to FF after they can't access many sites via IE."http://twitter.com/jiew/statuses/2248648604
>
> "foxyproxy and tor"http://twitter.com/sugree/statuses/2248689363
>
> if that is true that would be the first positive thing i hear about
> censorship :)
>
> On Jun 20, 10:23 am, 31o5 OHIRA <3105.oh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I'm not sure if it's related, but I saw a news about internet trend in
proteus guy
I think Satoko's pretty much got it. Before the first Barcamp in 2006, there really wasn't any open source community out there. The closest thing was Pantip forums talking about PHP. Thailand was effectively a Microsoft shop as they did a lot of promotions here with companies and schools. They had effective evangelization & lock-in as so many sites would use IE-specific features. You still can't use most bank websites without IE. :-(
So I think Open Source and Open Standards has shown itself to have practical value once awareness was made that these were not just esoteric options. The great work by the local translators getting Thai into Firefox gave Thai's a sense of ownership in it and this pride factor is clearly apparent. Had Mozilla simply paid a group to do it I don't think it would have been as effective so it speaks very highly for your methods. This is what our stated goals were when we kicked off the first Barcamp in Bangkok. Next we're going to see if we can't build up a local entreprenuership ecology leveraging what's been accomplished thus far. Should be interesting...
-- Ben Scherrey
Justin Yoshida
I've noticed that many of the pirated versions of Windows XP including
variants of the immensely popular "Dark Edition" and "Cool Edition"
started including FF in their installation scripts a couple years ago
but some Thai editions actually started setting FF as the default
browser after the localized version became available at the end of
last year.
I do not have exact figures, but from what I see, the market share of
pirated versions of Windows here is in the ninetieth percentile. It's
pretty common practice here for vendors to advertise new PC prices as
"sold without OS," or "Linux installed," and then to load pirated
versions of Windows before selling them... They do sell licensed
versions, but they aren't very popular to say the least, what with one
license costing almost as much as a normal office worker makes in a
month here in the upcountry (in Bangkok a normal office worker could
buy two or three licenses with one month's salary)
Once the default browser was set, it would be a non-issue for most
users, I think, since many users probably wouldn't know what it is.
/////////////////////////
There are some teachers at my university (myself included) who really
spread the word about FF after the localized 3.0x version came out,
mostly because we wanted every bit of precaution available against the
huge problems we face on our networks with viruses, malware, botnets,
and the the like. I'm sure there are other similar efforts at other
campuses; in these cases localization was key because the typical user
here won't use an English version of FF if a Thai version of IE is
available.
- Justin
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Gen Kanai<gka...@gmail.com> wrote: