Comments: IE 8 Beta 2 - More Languages

The version for Hong Kong doesn't hard code the proxy server to firewall.cn. :)

Posted by Joshua Kugler at September 17, 2008 10:47 PM

AFAIK People in Hong Kong mainly speak Cantonese, while they speak Mandarin in mainland china. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=548

Much of the time "written Cantonese" is "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker"'

On the other hand, there's already two English, two Norwegian, two Spanish and two Portuguese versions of firefox.

Posted by Mads at September 17, 2008 11:10 PM

Hong Kong folks read about Hong Kong news, so whenever I head there to install Firefox (or other apps) on computers, I get questions about why the Traditional Chinese version syndicates news from Taiwan.

Their written form of Chinese should technically be Mandarin-style, but colloquial differences have resulted in Cantonese-only words seeping into the written language, these make no sense when spoken out in Mandarin.

Btw, Hong Kong writes in Traditional Chinese, similar to Taiwan, but different from the mainland and Singapore, where it's mostly Simplified Chinese.

Posted by Gary Kwong at September 17, 2008 11:47 PM

Taiwan and Hong Kong use similar characters, but the words may vary. It's something similar to the "color" and the "colour".

Posted by cyfer at September 18, 2008 1:14 AM

Gerv, what others say above are correct, but I suspect that this *may* also have something to do with the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). Take a look at the following link for more info:

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/ccli/eng/hkscs/introduction.html

Also, the localisation should be different as Hong Kong Cantonese is not always written in the same style as PRC Mandarin, or Taiwan (province of China) Mandarin.

As other posters say, it may also be related to default page settings, like what site to use search from, where to get news from, etc. Hong Kong should have Hong Kong-specific sources.

There's a lot of diversity within PRC that causes headaches that you don't have with the homogeneous environment of en-US :)

Posted by Ali Ebrahim at September 18, 2008 1:50 AM
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