Mozilla CEO John Lilly *

Photo: Brigitte Sire * When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent. Along the way, Wall Streeters began pressing Mozilla to go public (it won't) and Mozilla CEO John Lilly wowed scores of suits with his talks about how the open source project became a successful business. Just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June, Wired sat down with Lilly at his company headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Wired: What are the biggest changes in Firefox 3?

Lilly: It's got 15,000 improvements. It's more secure and easier to use. But, most important, it's two or three times faster. Think about all the programs we run in our browser now — like office software. When Firefox 2 was developed three years ago, we ran those applications on our desktop. So in Firefox 3 we improved the JavaScript engine and changed the way the browser handles and allocates memory.

Wired: Why did Firefox catch on in the first place, and how has it stolen users from Microsoft's Internet Explorer?

Lilly: When Firefox came out in 2004, there wasn't much browser innovation happening at Microsoft. People used Firefox, saw it was really fast and liked the tabs, and stayed.

Also, people now understand what we stand for — the participatory and open Web — and they like that. It's why we launched Firefox 3 in more than 45 languages. The idea that people worldwide can feel a sense of ownership about software that's initially only in English — like IE7 — is bogus.

Wired: That's nice, but it's not exactly a long-term strategic plan. Do you worry about competition from Apple now that it has enabled Safari on Windows?

Lilly: I used to work at Apple. I have an iPhone. But there are other ways of developing software. Instead of relying on individual brilliance, we rely on enabling a network around the world, like Wikipedia does. That's a different aesthetic.

Wired: Is it an aesthetic or a rationalization for not producing well-designed products?

Lilly: It's an aesthetic. Apple is great if you like the way it comes. Firefox is great if you like to customize things. The focus is on how it lets you do what you want, not how it looks.

Wired: Roughly 85 percent of your revenue comes from Google. What happens if Google decides to build its own browser?

Lilly: It's kind of a sucker's game to speculate about what Google's going to do. That said, it was the Google guys who approached us — not the other way around — because Firefox was a good browser. Our relationship will be just fine, as long as we build something that people give a damn about.

Wired: Mozilla is a nonprofit foundation but also a for-profit startup. How does that work?

Lilly: We're like a university. We have a public mission — keeping the Web open — that we're supporting with economics. It's just that our competitors are all for-profit companies.

Wired: Does the browser still matter now that users access the Net with different, non-browser- dependent devices, like Amazon.com's Kindle?

Lilly: That's a bogus argument. People have been saying for 10 or 15 years that the PC is dead. Even with a good mobile device, I'll sit at my laptop when I'm near it because it's a better experience.

Wired: But still an imperfect one.

Lilly: There are huge problems left to solve. If your data is in the cloud, how do you access it when you're offline? How do you display video without using proprietary technologies? And then there's the whole mobile Web; I think it's not at all clear that it will look like the actual Web.

Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone?

Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it's because of technical issues — they don't want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That's a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We're focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there's not that many of them. We're part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you'll see more in the next year or so.

Contributing editor Fred Vogelstein (fred_vogelstein@wired.com) wrote about the iPhone in issue 16.02.

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