It has become more and more obvious to western internet sites that they will need to cater to Firefox users. With reports showing that more than 1 in 10 users in the US, and nearly 1 in 3 users in several large European countries, are accessing the web through Firefox, it's simply becoming a fact of doing business on the web that the days of writing to IE are over.
In the far east, it's not quite there yet. Firefox usage in countries like China, Korea, and Japan is considerably lower. But they're not sitting around waiting. Organizations that respect their users are already taking steps to make Firefox a first class citizen.
A perfect example of this is a company called Naver. I had the opportunity to visit Naver this winter in Seoul, Korea, and was very impressed by their plans for supporting Firefox and web standards. Naver.com is Korea's largest portal/search site with about 14 million individuals using their services every day! That's pretty awesome for a country with a population under 50 million -- they reach about 45% of all intenet users in Korea.
Naver has made the decision that all of their users matter, not just the majority using IE. To find and fix all of the problems that Firefox exposes in Naver.com is a huge amount of work. But rather than throwing their hands in the air and saying they don't have the resources to identify and fix all of these issues for a very small minority of their user base, Naver has decided to take another rout. They're engaging this community of Firefox users to help them bring their site up to speed for Firefox. They've agreed to fix all of the problems that their Firefox users can discover and report to them. This partnership will allow the company and its users to work together to solve a problem they both face and it demonstrates that Naver understands the relationship that exists on today's web between the commercial services and the community that gives those services their value.
You can read more about this effort in a post by Channy Yun over at Spread Firefox.
Let me also point out that Channy is responsible for the redesign of Korea's second largest portal site, Daum, converting the entire operation to a standards-based system that fully supports Firefox.
Our user base in Korea is small, but even a small group of people, working directly with the companies providing the services they rely on, can make a big difference. Soon, the largest two players online in Korea will support Firefox. Kudos to Naver and Daum, and to their communities of users, all working together to make this happen.
