Firefox: We caught Microsoft asleep at the wheel

 

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Posted on 11 Sep 2007 at 12:20

Firefox has achieved what many thought impossible and overturned Microsoft's browser monopoly. This week the company announced that the browser had achieved 400 million downloads. We caught up with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, to find out why the open-source browser has been so successful and get the latest news on Firefox 3.

Firefox has just hit 400 million downloads. That's a significant milestone for the browser, why do you think there's been so much interest?

I think there was a huge need from people for a secure and accessible browser. Browsers hadn't been evolving for close to six years, but the web was. The browser had been dead while Microsoft was asleep at the wheel. Malware attacks and pop-ups became common and people got fed up with it.

When we started with Firefox, our 20% [market share] was not an affordable dream. We dreamed of making that. We are fighting so people have a choice: it's very important to have market share so that web developers don't design sites specifically for Internet Explorer. Developing a website for just one browser is stupid.

Firefox is very popular in Europe especially, why has it done so well here?

We have a great, highly-motivated team in Europe. In Poland, for example, economic development caused the internet to come later to a generation that weren't already dependent on Internet Explorer and they saw immediately that Firefox was a better option.

How has the release of Safari for Windows impacted Firefox?

I don't have figures but we want several significant browsers on the market. One browser won't fit every need, that's why we have Firefox on several different platforms. I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that's what we stand for.

Let's talk about Firefox 3, are you close to release?

We're very prudent when it comes to release dates. We have plans but it'll ship when it's ready. We currently have several nice features but some are moving faster than others. Some features won't make it, they'll probably turn up in Firefox 4.

Our contributors have their own lives, we're open-source and even in a strictly professional environment not everything makes it.

Your collaboration with Google to support offline applications, such as Gmail, is one of the more interesting features we've heard about. Is that likely to make it?

I certainly hope that'll be true. No commitments, though.

So when are we likely to see the beta?

Beta shouldn't be too long, probably by the end of the year. We want it to be stable, usable. It will be, it's not going to format your hard drive or anything.

New Firefox releases have traditionally had problems with extension compatibility. Is this something you're looking at addressing with the new release?

It's a tricky problem - we're releasing new versions of Firefox almost yearly. For safety's sake all developers will have to release a new version of their extension before we will allow them to run.

Bookmark architecture in Firefox will be heavily redeveloped so extensions linked to this will probably be broken, but others will be fine. They'll just need testing. This is the purpose of the beta, so they can test.

We ran a story last month on Firefox's retention problems: only about 25% of people who download it actually go on to become active users. Are you looking at addressing that?