Shanghai - Mozilla, the well known developer of the open source Web browser Firefox, which is the second most widely used web browser only after Microsoft Corporation’s Internet Explorer, has set its target to increase its market share in China by at least twofold this year. China is all set to become the largest Web market in the world.

Gong Li, chief executive of Mozilla Online, said that the California based company is expecting the venture to be hard in a nation where customers largely lack awareness of open source and businesses usually establish their services only on Explorer.

Mozilla Online which is known as “seek wisdom” or “mou zhi,” in Chinese at present has about 4.5 million regular users in China. “There are around 4.5 regular users in china,” said Gong Li, who formerly worked at Microsoft’s MSN unit and at Sun Microsystems Inc.

“It will be a challenge to increase our market share to our global average, as most of Chinese services are built on Explorer platform,” Gong added. The present global market share of Mozilla Firefox is around 20 percent.

“5% is may not be enough, but still it is our goal for the 2nd half of the year,” Gong Li said. Mozilla’s present market share in China is around two percent.

Mozilla Online, Mozilla’s China unit, generates its revenue by means of donations and by means of tie ups with 3rd parties. In the last year, it struck a tie up with Baidu.com Inc to set in Baidu’s search engine in the Chinese version of Firefox.

Gong said “Our major advantage is that we have more creativity and we can change more quickly. When Microsoft edged past Netscape, it really didn’t give out anything new on the web browser front for long periods,” He said that this stillness would give mozilla’s firefox an opportunity to increase its fame by providing more ways for personalizing the software to the users.

Gong said that Mozilla Online will keep on looking for partnerships in China and expects to break even in 2 to 3 years time.

“Revenue from tie-ups can offer Mozilla a greater level of freedom than if it had relied completely on donations,” Gong added.

Xinhua news agency said, China was the 2nd biggest Web market with about 210 million Internet users at the end of 2007, it is next to the United States and China will have world’s largest Internet users by 2008.

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