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.
