Baidu is surprisingly the leading search engine in China, instead of Google, who is still falling in and out of love with the Chinese Government because it is not allowed to display any search results that might be offensive to the Party. And there's more to that story, but this is not the main issue at hand.

Gemme, of searchenginejournal.com, noted this morning that "Baidu has signed a deal with the affiliate of Mozilla in China to embed all the search engine's functions in the Firefox browser for a fee. Until now Baidu's seach engine had been integrated on a limited basis." Mozilla Online, the Firefox maker's affiliate in China, has signed the agreement to be similar to those it already has with Google and Yahoo!, and it will combine the advantages of the English search engines and of the Firefox browser.

Tradingmarkets.com quoted Mozilla Online's board chairman and CEO, Gong Li, as saying that his company's arrangements with the search engine providers do not affect each other.

"Baidu has been included in the list of search plug-ins installed with Chinese editions of Firefox since the release of Firefox 2 (or perhaps earlier, according to Ryan Paul, of arstechnica.com) but it is the first time when a deal has been inked between the two. The rapid growth of the technology sector in China makes it an appealing market for major software companies. Back in 2005, the Mozilla Foundation created a nonprofit branch in China-Mozilla's third international affiliate-in an effort to build stronger ties with the Chinese open source software community. Mozilla has worked hard during this past year to make its community more global, and China has been a major focus," says Paul.

It looks like a good move, because the Internet market is still growing in China and developers are just beginning to get a taste of what it can offer. And let's not forget that China has one of the largest populations in the world.