Firefox Offers a China Edition
It’s long been know within large web companies and elsewhere that web users in Asia use web sites and web tools in some ways that can vary greatly from their counterparts in The West. Mozilla recently shared some of their finding when announcing the release of their new China Addition of their Firefox browser:
> In the U.S. and Europe, web surfers are leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China, however, the process is much different. Web surfers there tend to lean back from the monitor while keeping one hand on the mouse, the other hand dangling. The keyboard is used much less frequently as much of the navigation is done with clicks instead.
The new version of Firefox, Firefox China Addition (beta) includes at least four interesting differences:
> * 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.
Read a more thorough overview on the always outstanding ReadWriteWeb blog: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefoxchinaeditioneverythingalocalbrowsershouldbe.php