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Exclusive vnunet.com interview: Mozilla's Tristan Nitot

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13 Oct 2005, Iain Thomson  , V3

Tristan Nitot
Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe

At this year's LinuxWorld show at Olympia vnunet.com caught up with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, to discuss the organisation's plans for the future.

Nitot worked for Netscape until 2003, but has been involved in the Mozilla project for much longer and managed the launch of Mozilla in Europe.

Formerly a keen skydiver when not slaving over a keyboard, he enjoys vintage motorcycles and digital photography.

The browser market is hotting up again and you're facing increased competition from the likes of Opera. What's the mood at Mozilla about this?

These are interesting times. At Mozilla our mission statement is to bring back choice and innovation to the web, and we always work to this goal. We're a huge project with thousands of individuals, and working to achieve this goal brings us together.

As such we are looking to see more of Opera. It's a good product which is web standards compliant, something that's very important for the future of the web. I don't believe there's one web browser for everyone. If Opera works best for you, then use Opera. If Mozilla works best for you, then use Mozilla.

What about the threat from Microsoft? How do you rate its browser development?

We'll be seeing Internet Explorer 7 sooner than expected; it was only due to come out with Windows Vista but Microsoft changed its mind. That's good news for the customer, because they get the benefit.

The web is maybe 10 years old, if you take the Netscape IPO as your starting point. IE really came in with Windows 95 and there was tremendous competition for four years, culminating in IE5 and by this time Microsoft had the vast majority of people.

Then for two years only one release, IE6, and that only had slight changes like improvements to the web standards system. Other than that Microsoft's done nothing, apart from Windows XP SP2 and some users still don't feel comfortable installing it for fear of application incompatibility.

Once Microsoft controlled the internet entry point, its interest in innovation ceased and it went back to making money from Office and Windows.

There's nothing wrong with that in a business sense. But we're not part of a business, just one part of a project. We thought the web needed choice and innovation.

The Spreadfirefox.com website has just been hacked for the second time in three months. Has someone got a grudge?

As soon as you become visible you become a target and you get people who will be proud to attack your website. There's a lot of probing going on over the internet, with automated programs always looking for weaknesses.

One argument put forward against open source code is that it relied on volunteers for support. How would you answer that?

If open source code has a problem at least you can see it for yourself and correct it, or others can.

There's also the question of open standards. I don't know about the UK but in many countries I meet government officials who are very sensitive about handing over the key to their sensitive data to a US company.

What's coming up in the latest version of the Firefox browser, version 1.5?

We've been working on four key areas. First off we've been examining the user experience, always a strong point for Firefox. We want to keep things simple, so there'll be tab reordering, and RSS will get a more prominent position in the URL bar.

There'll be new search options with answers.com, along with the other usual suspects, and we're redoing the preferences panel.

That leads into the second area: privacy. In the preferences section there will be a button to clear all private data. Two areas, passwords and cookies, will be retained as the default settings but you can go through those and edit them as well.

The third area of improvement is in patching and downloading. Rather than download a full application with the new version you'll be able to just download changes to the current code. Typically this will bring downloads down to 100KB and they'll install silently.

The last area is in full support for web standards. These are going to allow users to manipulate their web environment in new ways, like altering text windows and integrating instant messaging more fully.

There's a lot of talk about the next-generation internet. Where do you see it going?

[Laughs] I really don't know; I don't have a crystal ball. But I am sure we are making a difference by bringing choice and innovation.

Do you agree?

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