The future of Mozilla and Firefox

Last week was an interesting week in the browser wars.

Besides Microsoft’s promotion of its IE9 beta, Mozilla also made a splash at SingTel’s cloud-themed regional Accelerate event, where Mozilla’s chairman Mitchell Baker helmed a keynote.

Techgoondu had the chance to to do a 1-on-1 interview with Mitchell last Wednesday, and we discussed IE 9 beta and the future of Mozilla.

Talking to Mitchell was a treat: The rare candid top-level tech executive who minced no words and could articulate a clear vision.

Mozilla’s chairman Mitchell Baker (source: Mozilla Digital Memory Bank)

Microsoft has said a lot about its IE9 beta recently. They even compared IE9 beta with Firefox 4 beta 6 side-by-side at a Microsoft event and Firefox didn’t fare so well. Do you have any comments on this?

Well, Mozilla — as a non-profit organization — exists to bring choice and participation to the Internet. We built Firefox to make this happen. Turns out we’ve been successful enough to drive the competition (e.g. Microsoft and Google) to better their products.

Having IE improve is actually a big winning point for us. No, it doesn’t make our life more comfortable, but we’ll say yes to continued product competition.

If our competitors — with all the Phds that they hire — can’t produce something good, well then, it’ll be surprising. They have far more resources than what Mozilla has as a non-profit.

The future will have a multitude of browsers, with more benchmarks and support for more platforms (e.g. mobile). I expect interesting things to come from all of us.

Let’s talk about the direction that browsers are going. For example, IE9 has gone Chrome-like with a stripped down interface. Is Firefox likely to follow suit?

Chrome has made advances in the browser interface that appeals to users. However, we don’t believe that Google has all the answers.

Mozilla will learn, innovate, and continue to strive to be a fundamental platform for web innovation.

It’s important to point out this one thing that makes us different. What’s the agenda behind the software? Mozilla is a non-profit organization dedicated to driving innovation for the web. Our competitors are for-profit companies. Our missions are different.

So what’s the vision for Mozilla/Firefox moving down the road?

We believe in product excellence at Mozilla. This means continual improvement in our products like Firefox. Product excellence is measured in market share and mindshare, both by end users and by developers.

We want enough market share to be effective in our mission. At 5 percent we made a splash. When we hit around 10 percent web developers started writing code to work for Firefox.

But I also want to touch on things beyond browsers. What is the browser besides being a delivery mechanism for the services and applications that reside on the Internet?

Ask yourself this question: What can the Web do?

I don’t really know, but that’s why Mozilla is here: To help innovate the Web.

To this end Mozilla has a few key areas that we want to look at. One of this is to look into mobile browsing.

We are working to release a good mobile browser for the open-source platforms Android and Meego which should be out by the end of this year. Again, we want to garner a good number of users so that we can be effective in our mission.

Another area to look into and innovate is services beyond software (or browsers). Software on devices is not enough; in our new Web world users want services and a good customized experience from the Internet.

For example Apple’s iPhone and iPad does so well because it provides an excellent marketplace service. Marketplaces enable people to easily find things, evaluate them and then buy them.