Tristan Nitot, founder and president of Mozilla Europe

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arah Romero: What is the main purpose of Mozilla Europe?

Tristan Nitot: We are a non-profit organization and our goal and mission are aligned with the goal and mission of the Mozilla Foundation (US): we want to promote choice and innovation on the Internet.

S.R.: In Mozilla Europe´s presentation you said to the media that this initiative was founded "to increase Mozilla's influence in Europe as a source of developers, collaborators and product users". Do you think that Mozilla Europe has been a success by this terms?

T.N.: Certainly. We now have more contributors ans users in Europe than ever in the history of the Mozilla project.

S.R.: How much market share has Firefox in Europe nowadays?

T.N.: The French XitiMonitor.com Web site measures that 23% of visits on European Web sites it monitors are made using Firefox or one of its derivatives. It's better than the worldwide average and the US average, so we consider ourselves successful. To be clear, we have done much better than we have dreamt of!

S.R.: The duel with Internet Explorer seems to have become much more intense due to the release of IE7. According to recent news IE7 has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Do you consider this new version a threat? How do you see this situation in Europe?

T.N.: We are actually happy to see Microsoft back in the game after 5 years: we want all Internet users to have a better, safer browser, and Internet Explorer 6 was terrible.

Now, thought that the release of IE7 could be bad for our market share. So far, we have not seen any difference.

S.R.: Which are the most significant advancements done by Mozilla Europe since its foundation?

T.N.: I think that shipping Firefox in more than 40 languages, with the official Web site translated in these languages is our major achievement. Helping Firefox gaining market share is also very important, as it makes Web developers understand that they have to test their web sites with our browser. We also hope that the content will be compatible with all modern Web browsers such as Opera and Safari.

S.R.: Are there any important differences between the european Mozilla community and the american one?

T.N.: Well, we don't want to have two separate communities. There is a single Mozilla project, which is worldwide. It is important however, to have local communities in order to be close to our users and speak their native languages.

S.R.: At this point it´s impossible not to speak about the next releases of several Mozilla projects. Let's start with Mozilla Firefox. The next version of the browser will be 3.0 baptized as "Gran Paradiso". What kind of improvements will it bring? (There are many people wondering if the ideas spilt in the Wiki will be present in the next major version or not. Is there any estimated release date for Gran Paradiso?

T.N.: We try to release a new major version of the Firefox browser every 12 to 18 month, so we may expect Firefox 3 in a year from now, but we currrently don't have a firm date, as we ship software when it's ready.

When it comes to features, we want to add new features provided that they do not reduce the usability of our products. This is why our extension system is so wonderful: it enables us to provide an easy-to-use browser, while power-user can completely customize their experience. Also, the extension mechanism enables us to prototype innovative features and include them if they make sense.

Firefox 3 is very promising, as we want to enable off-line Web applications, for example. But there are lots of changes such as memory management, graphical engine, and a new version of our rendering engine, providing better standards support. For the end user, on top of improved speed and memory management, we'll see changes in the password manager, the history and bookmarking systems.

S.R.: Regarding market share - both world-wide and in Europe - which figures is Firefox 3.0 aiming at?

T.N.: We don't have a specific number to give. We want to be here for the long term and therefore we need significant market share. We are not aiming at monopoly, that's for sure!

S.R.: According to the official roadmap, other projects like Thunderbird are expected to see their next major version in the first quarter of 2007. Can you give us more details about Thunderbird's next release and an estimated release date? (According to some research it will include the possibility of tagging messages).

T.N.: Thunderbird is going to be released really soon now. I am using a pre-version of it, and it's already very stable. The whole idea behind Thunderbird 2 is how to organize your messages to be more productive. Tagging, virtual folders (aka views) are innovative ways to deal with large amounts of email...

S.R.: Do you think that the ever increasing number of Gmail users has affected traditional non-webmail email applications? Do you consider harmful the trend of Google and others of trying to put information and services from the user's computer on the internet, specifically on their servers?

T.N.: It is true that many newcomers on the Net tend to favor Webmails such as Gmail (Google), Yahoo Mail or Hotmail (Microsoft). To some extend, it may make sense to have your email messages available from every browser. Now the real issue is privacy, something that we highly value at Mozilla, and I'm not sure that all users do understand this issue, which applies to all services, not only Webmail.

S.R.: Could you explain how Mozilla development and testing works in projects like Firefox and Bugzilla. Who and how do they do their work?

T.N.: Because we are open-source / Free software, everybody can download the source code (if they have the technical knowledge and interest in doing so). Let's pretend that I need to make some changes to the source code. I will have to write a "bug report" in our on-line Bugzilla application. This will describe the issue I see, and how I would like to see it fixed. If I am knowledgeable enough, I could write the piece of code (the 'patch') to fix this issue. I would attach the patch to the bug report. My patch will be peer-reviewed and re-reviewed by other Mozilla contributors. I may be asked to fix some errors in it before it is included in the product. If I do this repeatedly, I will get skilled enough to be given "right access" to the source code, but every change I will make will have to be reviewed and super-reviewed.

Basically, the Mozilla project is a "meritocracy": I get more power because I have demonstrated that I can handle it.

S.R.: Now let's talk about information security. Computer criminals seem to be learning new skills to cause fraud or to damage users at such a high speed that it has become a problem with at least as much relevance as spam. How do the Mozilla Foundation treat internet security related threats?

T.N.: There are basically two kinds of threats: the ones where the user needs to be tricked (such as "Phishing") and the ones relating to bugs in our program's code. We offer now an anti-phishing system with Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 1.5.

When it comes to criminals using vulnerabilities in our software, we do our best to make their efforts useless in fixing these issues as fast as possible, so that it does not make sense for them to try to exploit them economically. They would rather attack our competition, which takes more time to fix issues. A journalist of the respected New York Times, Brian Krebs, recently wrote that "Internet Explorer (was) unsafe for 284 days in 2006". Brian Krebs noticed that Firefox was vulnerable for only 9 days on the same period.

S.R.: Open-source software based projects are gaining market share quickly. A few years ago many technology visionaries were talking about that, but advances in the enterprise market -without taking into account the server market- don't come as fast -for example in countries like Spain-. How do you see open source software growth in big companies?

T.N.: Many large companies use increasingly more and more Open Source software, but they tend not to communicate on this. Large administrations are also switching to Open Source, but tend to be more vocal about it. For example, the French car manufacturer PSA-Peugeot-Citroën has recently announced that they would migrate 20.000 desktops to Suse Linux.

S.R.: The internet is moving increasingly fast, many changes and innovations, the user has stopped being a passive subject and has become partly active, critical and the machine behind many changes. What do you think is the next step for the Internet?

T.N.: I am terrible at predictions, so I'd rather not make any long term ones. However, I think that we're just at the beginning of what can become the Internet, and this is why Mozilla is committed in making sure it remains this wonderful public resource as we know it.

S.R.: In order to inform our readers, if a user wants to cooperate somehow with Mozilla Europe, what can he/she do?

T.N.: It greatly depends of one's skills. Let's start with the easiest part, and talk about Firefox around you, make sure it's installed on all you relatives' PC. This is good for the Web to have diversity and competition. You could also donate money to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Europe may also use some help with localization of our products and Web site. And if you have higher technical skills, you could write extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird, and even contribute code to the project.

S.R.: We have one last question regarding one of your products: OpenWebGroup. What is it? Which is its purpose?

T.N.: It's a project we have started back in 2002, on a volunteer basis. Its main purpose it to promote Web standards, so that all pages can be rendered by all browsers which are respectful of these Web standards. Basically, it helps Web content authors to improve their skills in Web authoring.

S.R.: And finally, to end this interview would you define the world of open source a suitable/useful software or philosophy of life?

T.N.: I personally have very positive feelings towards concepts such as sharing knowledge and empowering people, and Open-Source/Free-Software is a great way to do this. Basically, once a software product is written, you could share it with the world at no cost. This enables a new economic system based on abundance. But the current economic system is based on scarcity. We are at the frontier between the two systems, so even if Free Software is a very interesting philosophy, we still live in a world of scarcity for most of our needs, including the most important things for everiday life, such as food and lodging. Free software is a dream which is slowly becoming reality.

S.R.: That´s all, thank you very much for your time. As a Firefox and Thunderbird user I can assure you that I await with great interest your next releases

T.N.: You are very welcome. Thank you very much for your insightful questions!