Mozilla FireFox: An Interview with its Co-Founder

[Wayne]

[align=center] Mozilla FireFox: An Interview with its Co-Founder
[/align][align=center]By: Wayne Dryden
[/align]
Have you ever wondered how Mozilla Fire Fox became so popular, and got its start into its current and rapid growing 20% global web browser usage? Or maybe just how the company got started, and how it functions. In a recent interview with Mike Shaver, co-founder of Mozilla, I have come to see how this non-profit open source software producing organization makes it all work.

In the beginnings of Mozilla, the founders decided that good solid working and secure software should not be just a luxury, but a right to computer owners. Therefore, they made the organization Non-Profit, to help better serve its customers. Yes, that's right Mozilla is a non-profit organization that operates around Fifty Million Dollars (according to 3rd quarter financial statements) at any moment in time. The majority of these funds are appropriated from large companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, and AOL so that the open source program can continue to be free. My question was why would these large companies want to give a new (in its early days) small company like Mozilla money? The simple answer is that when there is a common enemy, ANYONE will get together to kill the big dog, in this case Microsoft and all other non-open source programs and companies. However, FireFox was not Mozilla's primary idea. Mozilla is a 10-year-old company where as FireFox is only approaching its 4th birthday. The original goal of Mozilla was to make the users feel like they were in control of the technology that was available to them, and from the looks of their current market share it seems successful. But enough about Mozilla, what about Fire Fox?

Just to give you a few quick facts about FireFox. The program has a growing market share of 20% globally. They have about 125 employees around the world including Toronto, Paris, and New Zealand with 85 of those employees specializing in software security. The Program has about 6 million lines of code, and supports 40 different languages with hopes to have 50 for its 3.0 release. There are about 3000 add-ons for the web browser, and over 100 million users. The FireFox website generates about 120 million hits a day and a half million browser downloads per day. With such a small amount of employees, I asked Shaver, how is it that FireFox can put out such good releases in such a small amount of time if there are upwards to 6 million lines of code. His response was simple, "The public."

The public plays such an important role in the open-source program that if they were not there, FireFox itself would not exist. Although they have 125 employees, there are about 1500 active code contributors to the program from small platform coding to large projects such as the session restore feature seen in their 2.0 release, and the coders are only a small portion of the battle. There are over 20,000 beta testers none of which are paid, who test FireFox on a nightly basis and report bugs and security holes. Surely, I asked, there must be some kind of large system that keeps track of all these people and what they are working on and developing? The answer was shocking to me: No, not at all. FireFox uses simple message boards, and IRC chat servers to keep in touch and relay information. The only system that keeps things organized, Shaver said, was a system named Bugzilla which keeps track of current bugs and known issues to be fixed in their releases.

A few things that the developers pride themselves with is firstly their software that works, and secondly their ability to make things happen in the market. Many people at Mozilla believe that if it wasn't for FireFox there would have never been a new release of Internet Explorer after it's version 6 release, but after the increase of market share of FireFox Microsoft was pressured into making a new release – "one that works better, and a little more for the users", as Shaver put it. Making things happen in the software business was one of the their primary goals in the beginning according to Shaver, and it seems to be working thus far.

The three largest concerns for FireFox were made very clear to me – security, then security, and lastly security! "Having no bugs is impossible, but getting bugs fixed immediately is possible", Shaver said. After FireFox's launch of 2.0 they had 7 days of security vulnerability, and released an update 2.0.0.4 which was updated in 6 days by 90% of its users, which is an improvement of 25% from its first round of updates from FireFox 1.0. The large improvement can mostly be attributed to its design of software updates, and it's built-in session resort function.

Moving forward, Mozilla is looking to continue its development of free software for its users, and to stay on path of its goal to make good software open-source. FireFox also hopes to continue putting pressure on the large companies that make software to continue to improve on standards, and security moving forward. "Even if our market share goes down in the end, we will have still accomplished our goal of putting better software out there for users."

[Tami]

Quite an informative article, Wayne. It's always good to find out what a company's philosophy is, and why they keep doing the things they do. I wish there was alot more open source software out there which was being kept up to date and staying in development. There used to be some really good programmes available but they were mothballed and fell into the deep black pit of "no longer supported and now extremely outdated" ---unless you're still on Win98 <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... igwink.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\';)\' />

Thank you for taking the time to write this up and share it with the rest of us. <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... /smile.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':)\' />