Interview: Firefox in the hunt for mobile users

IT Week: As president of Mozilla Europe, how do you manage a large open-source community?
Tristan Nitot: We have processes to harness the creativity and energy of close to 100,000 people all over the world, and to focus this on creating well-polished, easy-to-use products. We use a software tool called Bugzilla that’s accessible to anyone with a browser. Contributors can use this to see what’s happening on a project, and they can use it to report bugs or requests for changes.

How is the Thunderbird email project progressing now that it has been spun off into a separate venture with $3m of new funding?
David Ascher, head of the new company, is currently meeting members of the community and encouraging some to become full-time contributors. He is also talking about the calendaring extension being included by default in future versions of Thunderbird. This will mean Thunderbird is not just about email but calendaring, which is something that a lot of users have been asking for. In the future, David may consider other features, but it is a bit blurry at the moment.

How is the development of Firefox 3 proceeding?
We are in the second beta phase at the moment. The feedback has been extremely positive, which is encouraging considering we were working on the engine in this beta two years ago. People particularly seem to be enjoying the “places” feature, which enables you to manage your bookmarks and history very easily. By tapping keywords into the address bar it will display some good and often useful suggestions of related and previously visited URLs.

Are the browser and domain names still relevant now that many people use search engines to find the web site they want?
Mozilla recognised some time ago that search was a very important activity for a web browser user. That is why, by default, we have a search page open whenever a user opens a new window. We then introduced a search box in the top right-hand corner. Google does a great job of giving relevant links, but the type of behaviour we are now seeing in customers is that they have a lot of favourite sites so you can use your browser history in this case.

Are there any other technologies in development?
Aside from Firefox 3, our daily preoccupation is the Gecko rendering engine ­ the underlying technology beneath Firefox. Version 1.9 will ship with Firefox 3 and we are working on a new version to be called Mozilla 2, which is to be a major revision of our technology. There is a lot of focus on simplification, so we can be more approachable by external contributors. This is a key factor in the success of open-source projects, because if the code is too complex everyone will be scared and walk away. We also want to improve the engine in terms of memory consumption.

How far down the mobile web road is Firefox?
We want to do a version of Firefox for mobiles. The Nokia N810 is shipping with a Mozilla-based browser that uses Gecko 1.9, so it is possible. The key to getting more mobiles shipping with Firefox is optimisation of the new version of Gecko so that less CPU is needed. We are also looking into how mobile and desktop browsers interact.

Can you elaborate on that last point?
We are carrying out an experiment codenamed Joey that involves placing software on a server, a mobile phone and on the desktop as a Firefox extension. It enables you to save a piece of important information from your desktop browser and send it to the Joey server. It can then be accessed by your mobile phone’s browser or the Joey application on your handset.

What are the barriers to the success of Firefox in the mobile space?
It is a young market and at the moment not a very open one. Things are a little different in the US, but in Europe device manufacturers have their own vision of what they want to see on their devices, and the operators have a different vision from this. At the moment, these telcos control the distribution. So a user may want one thing, but what he or she gets is a result of this struggle between device manufacturers and operators because the telcos do not want to become just pipes for bandwidth. They know that if this happens they will not be able to bill users for talk because everyone will be using VoIP and their whole margin will crumble. However, we think that this will happen eventually and what we are doing today is designed to make sure that when it does happen ­ and the market is open enough ­ we are ready with the appropriate technology.