The Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the popular Internet browser, Firefox, has their eyes set on China in an effort to compete in the world’s second-largest Web market.  

The Mozilla Corporation was established in August 2005 to handle the revenue operations of the Mozilla Foundation, a non profit organization, with a rumored $75 million profit from Firefox in 2005 and an ever increasing ad revenue from Firefox’s Google toolbar. 

Mozilla has been in China for some time now, but their presence  consists of a non-profit office entirely dedicated to supporting open-source software. Mozilla is ready to take the next step by opening up a corporate office in Beijing.

Skeptics are questioning whether the new corporate office will have any influence on the browser’s popularity in China; stating that it’s already available worldwide, and anyone is free to download and share the open-source browser,  and tweak it to their liking.

Mozilla Chief Operating Officer, John Lilly, is expecting to match their Japanese market with a nine percent share in China in just a couple years; however, Lilly is taking a different approach to winning over the market by not pushing it on consumers. “It’s not our goal to make sure that everyone in the world is using Firefox. My main goal is that people know there’s a choice.”

The explorers of the Internet are constantly switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox, and not just because of security;  Firefox prides itself in its security. A 2006 Symantec study showed that Firefox had surpassed Internet Explorer in the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities that year through September.

The bottom line – Firefox is fun; with developers constantly pushing out extensions and add-ons, it will be impossible for the nearly 135 million users of China to resist. 

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Entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 4:41 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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