Stream of Ry

Evening of September 18 — Went out for a dinner with Mozilla Campus Reps from the area. The dinner was initiated by Gen of the Mozilla Foundation who was coming over to Manila with Seth for their pitch in WordCamp Philippines the next day.

Some of the topics that were discussed during dinner was :

1. Traffic in Metro Manila
2. State of Firefox growth in the Philippines and what is driving it
3. Will a localized (we read it as: translated) version of Firefox gain traction?
4. Incoming improvements to the browser
5. What we can do to jump start a Mozilla community in the Philippines
6. How Gen lives his life in Japan as a “big guy” (as Ren Ren put it)
7. How Pacquio has risen to celebrity icon status in the US

(1) Traffic is bad, we know. An hour late is still lucky. XD

(2) We found out surprising statistics on the growth of Firefox in the Philippines. Apparently, Firefox has grown by more than double in the past two years in the Philippines and we are now at fourth place in the world in terms of growth rate. One of the initial pull-factors was security as add-ons and extensibility is more for power users, in my opinion.

(3) As Gen said, localization is more than translation. It also involves customizing search engines, news feeds and services for the target country. In this context, localization would be very much welcome. However, the majority agreed that a Tagalog version would not gain much traction. However, Ren said that he had met a couple of people who did know english at all. We sought out the cause of this and eventually ended up with the problems of the education system here in the Philippines. Haha. Funny, isn’t it?

(4) There are a lot of things in the works over at the Mozilla Labs. One is Fennec, a web browser for the Maemo. Another is the single-thread tab implementation.

(5) We will most likely break ground with a community website or initially with a community mailing list. Reply here so I can invite you once the mailing list is created or the website is put up.

(6) Apparently, life is a bit inconvenient for a big guy in Japan.

(7) Even the celebrities want to take a picture with him. XD

All in all, a fun dinner. It was a 7 out of 9 majority, in favor of UP Diliman though. The remaining 2 was from Laguna. This time, dinner was on Mozilla. We won’t be so lucky next time, I think, particularly when the community grows. Maybe in the next meeting, we will get a fair mind share from different universities. I’ll do my best to invite people from other universities.