Mozilla as a social moment of the open web

Some reflection from recent MozTW offline events and PCHome magazine interview we gave:

The web applications and the browsers will become the so-called “the cloud computing” environment, where everything you wrote, song, and filmed are stored and shared between people. Every piece of information will be interconnected.

That’s what the trend had told me, from big things like Google building a browser, to small everyday things like identities and information being shared and transfered between websites.

Here is what Bob said when he heard that from me (well, not the exact words of course, since I am writing it down here in English):

If this is the trend, then the the role of Mozilla Foundation is to make sure what we believed in will be deeply embedded  into that future. The believes, like the web should be build upon open standards; identities should be decentralized; the information and the wisdom within should be easily preservable and sharable with the consent of the authors; etc.

Mozilla is a foundation that runs a software company, and a social moment of the open web.

Wow. Being a small contributer to the Firefox software, I never pictured so clearly this is what we do stands for. Glad to be one of us.

Mozilla, the social moment of open web. And they have plans… the fraking robots.

新的 Firefox 下載頁面/Firefox download landing page on MozTW

Brief info in English: I’ve just added download landing pages for the MozTW website. It features some links to local resources (in Chinese), and a special tweak to initiate download in IE without having information bar pops up.

Mozilla Taiwan 首頁的 Firefox 下載連結一直都是直接指到 Mozilla Corp. 的下載頁面 (landing page),由該頁啟動實際下載的檔案連結。跟其他下載頁面一樣,它會啟動下載,然後附上一個「如果下載沒有開始請按這裡」的連結…

只是它是用英文寫的。

這當然造成了推廣的麻煩啦,在高雄跟我們偉大的勞工的叔叔阿姨講課推廣網路使用與自由的 Irvin 就遇到學員「回家後就不知道怎麼下載 Firefox」的問題。更慘的是,該頁面為了要避免觸發 IE 的下載警告資訊列,所以不會啟動自動下載,使用者一定要按連結才行。儼然就是你看不懂英文就無法用 IE 抓到 Firefox 中文版,囧。

Mozilla 有和我們要過下載頁面翻譯,但是不知為何他們一直沒放上來,直到現在都決定要更新下載頁面了還是沒放。所以還是得自力救濟囉。

我今天把下載連結換到我們自己的下載頁面,裡面簡單放了一些尋求中文社群支援、協助,一起推廣等等的連結。網址在這裡,但還是建議要指引別人下載 Firefox 的朋友還是指到首頁去(這樣才能順利在 IE 啟動下載,原因容後敘述):

實際的檔案還是會取自他們的負載平均下載系統。希望這樣能為本地使用者帶來 Firefox 應有的網路體驗囉(也希望 Firefox Setup.exe 是他們用 IE 下載的最後一個檔案,哈)。

接下來寫一些在 IE 啟動下載的技術筆記,有興趣的話再繼續看。

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