Mozilla: Why Firefox Matters

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Interview - We had a chance to chat with Johnathan Nightingale Mozilla's Director of Firefox Engineering about Firefox' current challenges, its opportunities, its rivals, trends and its future.

Johnathan Nightingale

Mozilla's Firefox experienced a pretty rapid turn of fortunes last year and is still dealing with the effects of a changing browser landscape today. The rise of Chrome, a more competitive Microsoft, an increasingly loyal Apple user base, the often-delayed release of Firefox 4, created a perfect storm against Mozilla that is affecting its market share and credibility. Johnathan Nightingale agreed to spend some time with us to talk about the current state of Firefox and its immediate future in a very competitive environment.

As spokesperson for Mozilla and as Director of Firefox Engineering, Johnathan Nightingale is one of the most influential people at Mozilla as far as the future of the Firefox browser is concerned. He has been working for Mozilla since 2007.

A Chrome Misunderstanding

When discussing Firefox and its competitive landscape, Mozilla is quick to point out its key difference to any other browser that is available today. "We do not have to respond to shareholders," said Nightingale. In a time that is changing the strategy of Mozilla dramatically, there is still the philosophy that Firefox answers to no one but the user. It is not made to lock you into a platform, or to gather your data and make money off of you. Mozilla envisions Firefox to be made for the open web and for the user. It's the corner of the market no other browser has touched. Firefox has no agenda or alternate motives but to be the best browser Mozilla can make with the resources it has available.

Given the power of Google, Microsoft and Apple, it is easy to shake off this ideal as a noble, but ill-fated goal in a money-driven world. And how realistic is that goal anyway if all that we see today is a Firefox that is playing catch-up with Chrome that copies Google's ideas?

Nightingale was very open to discuss Chrome and its impact on Firefox. He spoke very positively of it, especially that it provided an incentive for other browser makers to shape up in some areas. However, he denied that Mozilla is only copying features from chrome these days, which is an allegation we frequently hear from our readers. Firefox 4 was in development for a long, long time – more than a year and an eternity in modern browser refresh cycles. Being an open-source product, it followed the policy of being available to the public at all times.

Even before the beta phase started, companies like Google and Opera could easily get their hands on the code for Firefox and explore it for new ideas. Chrome, which has always been on a fast release cycle and Opera, which had a major as well as a few minor releases during the span of the FF4 Beta, borrowed ideas from the unreleased browser and got to implement it into their released versions long before Mozilla could. To the general public, it may appear as if Chrome has a lot of features, which Firefox just cloned. In reality some of these features were actually cloned from Firefox. Nightingale mentioned the "colored URLs" in the location bar as an example. He also noted the do-not-track feature, which was picked up by Microsoft for IE9.

However, he indicated that there is an unofficial idea sharing policy in place: "Chrome does not have a monopoly on the UI and being fast," Nightingale said. "If there is a good idea that comes from someone else, we will take as well. We really don't want to claim that we are the only ones who have good ideas."

The rapid release cycle that has been adopted by Mozilla should take care of rolling out ideas faster to the actual product, but there remains the question why Chrome has increased in popularity at an almost unreal level. Of course, Nightingale pointed to advertising and budgets that enables each of its competitors "to spend more than [Mozilla] ever could", but he also gave Chrome credit for its focus on speed. "The focus on speed over everything else was good for us and it was good for IE," he said. While those early performance wins seem to be less relevant today, they got a lot of people to switch to Chrome and built the reputation of a lean and fast browser, even if some browsers are faster in certain speed disciplines than Chrome today. Much like Firefox shook up the web by forcing IE to focus on greater security, compatibility, and add-ons, Chrome has forced the market to pick up the slack as far as performance is concerned, Nightingale said.

The executive does not see Firefox trailing the browser evolution. Firefox' mission is still to promote the open web and while Mozilla sees good ideas coming from other browsers, it is obvious that it has a tough time with the trend that the Internet is turning more and more into environments of walled gardens that are dominated by corporate interests.

The Future of Firefox More Than Just Firefox

Google, Microsoft and Apple have pretty clear ideas how the browser will evolve. At Apple, it may only be an app, at Google it may become a search-engine promotion tool and an operating system and Microsoft will use IE to promote its new HTML5 app store that is set to arrive with Windows 8. Where does that leave Firefox? We have learned a bit more what Mozilla is up to and how it will be building its own platform last week, but the future of Firefox is still a mystery.

Nightingale said that today's browser acts as your conduit to the web. In the future, it should do "more than just render web pages," but become "your agent" as the Internet evolves from a medium that primarily holds information to a source for entertainment, business, communication and interaction. When a user accesses a site today, a browser pretty much does what the site tells it to do. As a more advanced user, you could possibly set restrictions to certain sites. However, Nightingale would like to see a future smart browser, which reverses the trend and the user determines what the browser should do. "The browser today is a depressingly narrow concept as you can only render pages. A browser should help you decide, interact and manage relationships such as your ID and preferences," Nightingale stated.

According to Mozilla's thoughts, some sites should have access to some information and some not. Some should be able to do some things which others should not. Currently, a part of that vision can be realized, if you are willing to put the effort into your browser, but a future browser should be able to automatically detect these sort of things and make your life much easier.

Nightingale said that Mozilla is working on Firefox' ability to render apps just as well as it does web pages. Ultimately, if the goal is to just view a web page today, then no matter what browser you will use, as long as it is up-to-date, it will render it properly. In the future you will also have web apps and those may not be rendered like a web site.

Within one year, Nightingale believes that Firefox will still be released in a rapid release cycle, and technologies such as Sync and platforms such as Browser ID and Boot-to-Gecko will have evolved.

Mozilla Vs. World

Given the state of current browsers and the magnitude of corporate interests that are driving browsers today, you could get concerned about Mozilla's future. However, it is exactly the corporate interest that will keep Firefox going, said Nightingale. When asked about the threat of closed platforms he noted that "there are 400 million Firefox users who would have to say something about that."

He isn't so much concerned about browser backends such as Webkit, but a clear threat of a "siloed web against the open web". However, the challenge isn't anything new to Mozilla. "We have done it in the past and we can do it again." he said.

The problem, however, is that Mozilla's only chance to defend the open web from corporate interests could be a direct confrontation with Google, Apple and Microsoft – and we are seeing this confrontation already surface at least on the part of iOS, where Mozilla is openly complaining that its access to providing a browser on Apple's platform is very limited. However, while possible, the scenario of an open battle would not fit Mozilla's ideals and would most likely not resonate with its users and general user and developer environment.

"The attempt to fence users into proprietary platforms with apps today is reminiscent of the previous effort to do the same on computers, and the Web disrupted that ecosystem," Nightingale said. "On the Web, an application is accessible to everyone, regardless of the operating system their computer runs. Apps on phones should be no different. The web can win there, too, and Mozilla is working to make that happen."

A possible confrontation may be a different kind of scenario than we would expect between Google and Microsoft, for example: "Mozilla will compete by being a fundamentally different kind of organization. We're a non-profit, open source group and we are focused on making the Web the most amazing place to build and discover great new technology. We put our users in control and answer to no one else."

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