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.
Do you agree?
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