Seoul Firefox 3 release party
Last week I attended the Firefox 3 release party in Seoul, in Daum Headquarters. Daum is the main search engine in Korea, way ahead in market penetration than Google and there were a lot of interesting people related to the Korean Internet world.
The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.
In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.
I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions . I think is the correct way.
For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.
It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!
UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr