Have you seen the Chinese Firefox?

There are Chinese web browsers, of course: there are about 250 million Internet users in China. But there's a bit more to the Chinese Firefox than simply a browser that can display Chinese characters.

The new version, just announced includes a new feature: Live Margins.

It's a new sidebar on the right, and apparently it is "a unique solution to the longstanding problem of tab browsing where only one tab is visible at any time". But it also gives "additional search results, relevant information, music, video, and much more," so I'm not that clear what it does. There are screenshots on this Chinese language page.

Whether or not this is a fundamental advance, it is also localised, including information from the Chinese Youtube, and Chinese sites for music and other information.

It's come from Mozilla Online, the Beijing-based Mozilla subsidiary, an outfit headed by an interesting sounding guy. Li Gong has in his time been chief Java security at Sun, before returning to China to head up Sun's research there, and then running Microsoft's MSN in China.

I don't know if we'll see Live Margins in English-language versions of Firefox - maybe it won't read so well with Western reading patterns? - but I think this is a sign of the times. I expect to see more open source form China in future....

Thanks to Glyn Moody for the link.