“Mozilla Online in Beijing created Firefox China Edition (beta), a web browser designed with the needs of the Chinese web surfers in mind.”
The browser contains several features which make it useful for Chinese users, including:
* New mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn’t as common a habit of Chinese users
* Some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click
* A drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China). Maxthon is usually included on the CD with the pirated copy of Windows XP that many Chinese have installed.
* A new sidebar called “Live Margins” which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks. (This sidebar is also available as the Juice addon – for more info, see our review).
Get it at http://www.g-fox.cn/
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I can actually see this having great potential in China as it has lots of the features that Chinese people are looking for. The web is a completely different place over here, the majority of browsing still being done in ‘BBS’ forums rather than on Blogs and social networks. I just hope that some of the big internet sites over here will make their websites compatible with browsers other than IE so that people can make the move to newer, better browsers.
Indeed. Some websites are making an effort to work in Firefox but sadly some still rely on stupid Active-X technologies – qq.com being a prime example. China is embracing open source and open technologies which is an immensely good thing. They just need to embrace open web standards and stop relying on outdated Microsoft technology.
Firefox China Edition is a great step in the right direction as it offers the Chinese people the kind of features that they come to expect from a web browser. I agree with you that the internet is a different place in China, and it’s great to see Mozilla take the Chinese market very seriously by opening a China office and encouraging the development of a tailor-made browser specifically for Chinese users.
It’s good to see that there is a Linux version of this released in both Chinese and English. Unfortunately for myself, the Linux version is supplied in a tarball so it’s not that easy to install. But looking at this, the only feature that I would use is the “Live Margins” which I have added to my own Firefox now. The addon is called “Juice” and is written by a Beijing company. It’s actually the same addon supplied with Firefox China Edition under the “Live Margins” name.