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When Mozilla introduced the Firefox 4 Internet browser to great fanfare back in May, the most frenzied response came from Indonesia.

“Indonesians love to get together. It’s part of our culture,” Viking Karwur, a freelance Web designer, said of an eight-city roadshow to promote the browser. “That’s why our campaign in May was the biggest in the world.”

The roadshow, which was sponsored by Mozilla headquarters in San Francisco, was attended by chairwoman Mitchell Baker and engineers and developers from Mozilla. It was organized, however, wholly by local volunteers like Viking.

“It caused a stir abroad,” Viking said. “It got people to sit up and think ‘Wow, there really are a lot of creative people in Indonesia.’ People hadn’t thought about catchy ways to promote the browser until the idea came from Indonesia to introduce these foldable paper toys of Kumi, the Firefox mascot, that you can make from a template downloaded from the Internet.”

Tuesday marks the official release of Firefox 7, and while the launch is more muted this time, the groundswell of support that fuels the “people’s browser,” as Viking calls it, is no less electric. Since the first version was launched in November 2004, Firefox has taken over Indonesian computers by storm, dominating with more than 75 percent of desktop browser share, compared to just 27 percent worldwide, according to StatCounter.

Viking attributes this to the democratic nature of Firefox. Its add-ons and extensions — mini programs that provide additional features for the main browser – are developed largely by an army of volunteers. It is also fiercely open source, meaning no one can lay proprietary claim to it. Mozilla, the group behind it, is, fittingly enough, a foundation and not a corporation.

As the Mozilla Indonesia community manager, Viking is part of the grassroots community of users that forms the backbone of Firefox.

“Back before November 2004, if you wanted to browse the Web, there were no real choices for browsers because Windows came bundled with Internet Explorer,” he said.

“Browsing was a very disappointing experience. All you had was HTML and Flash. As a Web designer, I wanted something different. Then Firefox came along and it offered that something different. Here was a Web browser that the user could customize, that had add-ons, that could block pop-ups.”

The early iterations of Firefox introduced users to Javascript — now the most popular scripting language for the Web and the bedrock of social networking sites such as Facebook – and thereby offered a far richer browsing experience than HTML could, without hogging resources or bandwidth like Flash did. The latest versions are pushing the technological boundaries even further with full support for HTML5, the new benchmark for Web site scripting aimed at greater interactivity and multimedia support.

Yofie Setiawan, the Jakarta leader of the Mozilla Reps (ReMo) community, says future releases will support WebGL, another breakthrough designed to use hardware graphics acceleration to render fast and seamless interactive, three-dimensional content on Web pages. The fact that they are open source, he said, allows these innovations to be adopted faster on Firefox than they would in other browsers.

“Again, it’s open source, so if other browsers go on to adopt these technologies, that’s ultimately a good thing for the user,” he said.

“For Mozilla, it’s not about competing with the other browsers. Mozilla has always supported the user. We want the user to benefit from all our innovations.”

It is this goal of providing users with the best browsing experience, while letting them be part of the process, that underlies the continued development of Firefox, Yofie said.

Viking believes Indonesians have become particularly enamored with the browser because of its sense of shared ownership.

“With other communities, people first get together, formulate a shared concept, then share it,” he said.

“With Firefox, it’s not like that. Every user becomes part of the community.”

This is reflected in the motley make-up of Indonesia’s ReMo community. Yofie and Viking are Web designers; Fauzan Alfi, the Bandung leader, is an architecture student at Bandung Institute of Technology; and Makassar leader Irayani Queencyputri is a dentist by day.

Even the idea for the paper toy of Kumi came from a regular Indonesian user. Indonesia is only the fifth country — after the United States, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — to come up with its own localized version of Kumi, and it is the only country with more than one version.

As if to close the circle, this promotional tool for Indonesians’ browser of choice is now expected to help raise the profile of the country’s own Web community on the global stage. A version of Kumi sporting the Garuda emblem is planned for official release on Sunday, National Batik Day, and will be the Indonesian delegation’s mascot at the global Mozilla summit in Kuala Lumpur in November.