Mozilla Takes on Microsoft in China

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Bill Xu, founder of the ZEUUX Free Software Community, a Beijing group that promotes open source, points out that for Firefox to succeed in China, it shouldn't compete on cost but by stressing its security features. "IE isn't very secure. It's plagued with a lot of add-ons, malware, and viruses. Firefox is more secure, and that's the main reason a lot of users choose it," he says.

In January, Xu, 29, started an open letter campaign against China Merchants Bank after discovering he couldn't do online banking using Firefox. Many Chinese banks do not have their own IT department, so they buy off-the-shelf online banking software, which uses Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX software module.

Most Prefer the Package

That means the bank's customers must use Microsoft's IE browser to bank online. Since Xu only has open-source software on his laptop, he had to borrow a friend's computer to bank online. He is wary of imposing on his friends too many times, so he has given up online banking and makes the trip to the branch instead. So far, more than 200 people have responded to his open letter campaign.

Firefox still has work to do in order to meet the needs of Chinese users. A supposed benefit of Firefox is that users can personalize their browsers by installing add-ons to perform a range of tasks from getting weather updates to checking Gmail (Google e-mail) accounts. But Gong and his team of six surveyed Firefox users in China and found most users preferred to download browsers with the add-ons pre-packaged instead of having the option to customize.

And while Firefox offers 4,000 add-ons, they are all in English. "A lot of people in China use the Internet to watch movies or listen to music. It would make things easier if Firefox included these add-ons instead of forcing the users to look for the add-ons on the Internet," says Shen Xiaodong, 24, a Web site designer helping a Beijing startup make sure its Web site is compatible with six different Web browsers. "Most people don't know where to look for these add-ons."

Taking the Message to Campus

Mozilla's China team has been reaching out with local partners to customize Firefox to their Chinese users' preferences. Besides Baidu, Mozilla is in talks with other Chinese Internet companies about partnerships. Gong declined to say how much Mozilla's deal with Baidu is worth, explaining it depends on the amount of traffic and the revenue Baidu makes from its search function in Mozilla Firefox.

Since Mozilla is essentially starting from scratch in China, it has decided to first focus its efforts on the base of core users to build more awareness. It has set up a campus ambassador program in four universities in Beijing, where student volunteers work to educate college students about Firefox. Mozilla is also reaching out to computer programmers and Web masters to encourage them to build Web sites to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards instead of IE standards.

Such steps may seem elementary, but they are necessary in China, where most people don't know even know which Internet browser they use. Gong recalls visiting one software company that supplies Linux to Chinese government agencies and noticing an IE icon on the computer desktop. When he asked the programmer why they installed IE on Linux, they told him that it was actually Firefox. "Our users don't know what Firefox is, but they know this button is Internet," says Gong. "So they overlay the IE button on top of the Firefox icon."

Tschang is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Beijing bureau.