Firefox: Doing it for love

There are disadvantages to this model, for example, extensions are likely to be written by people who don't have the knowledge to make them the fastest they can be. Some things you could do faster or better if it was integrated [into the browser]. But it’s a worthwhile trade-off to keep the interface simple.

Have you used extensions in the core Firefox product?
Certainly — tab browsing came from the extension community in the pre-Firefox days. We're adding an extension called miniT, which lets you drag and drop tabs, in 1.1. We're not going to add all 800 extensions as if we integrated them all we would have a mess that no-one could understand.

Firefox has been an undisputed success, but the Thunderbird email client does not appear to have had anywhere near the same level of success. Why is this?
Thunderbird is a huge success. When you look at the Mozilla Suite, which had a browser and mail client, it had a few million users — mostly for the browser, some for the email. Maybe we had a million people using the email part. Thunderbird has already shipped more than six million downloads.

It isn't seeing the same kind of adoption that Firefox has, because people are scared about moving their email client — they don't want to touch it. It’s a difficult thing to get in and change. With a browser you can try it and if you don't like it, you can stop using it. With email you can't do that. We don't expect Thunderbird to ever to have the success that Firefox has, but it can still be successful.

So, what are some of the big features that are coming up in Firefox 1.1, the next version of the browser that's due in July?
Our big thing in 1.1 is a world class update system that allows you to get application updates in similar way to Windows Updates — it will automatically install patches and updates, so the user doesn't struggle to get each security fix.

Behind the scenes we're working on support for next generation web standards, such as SVG [the scalable graphics standard]. SVG allows clients to redraw graphs so you don't have to do a round trip to the server. This makes dynamic Web pages load faster. SVG is going to be huge. We're working to support SVG 1.1 and in Firefox 1.1 we hope to have a big piece done.

We're also pushing into the platform space with Xulrunner [a package that can be used to build standalone networked applications]. This will allow people to create custom clients for their web services.

So, what exciting new features have you got planned in the future?
I don't believe in next big thing. It's about user experience, not features. Blake [Ross, the creator of Firefox] says that he hopes with every release of Firefox, we can take away a feature. His motto is to simplify.

I think Google's Gmail is good because it takes email and simplifies it. They're not doing anything wildly innovative. It's the same with Google maps, isn't that how every map should work? That's not revolutionary — that's what my mum would expect the first time she went online and found a map. Let's do what the user expects. It's worth engineers doing extra work so users don't have to.

My goal is to figure out what the next feature is that we can remove — features are a hoop that users have to jump through.

And finally, do you enjoy your job?
I love this job, I wouldn't do anything else. I was doing 20 or 30 hrs for free before I got this job. People are doing this job because they love it. There's no IPO in a non-profit's future, so people work here for the love of the product and the community.

To read Dotzler's view of Firefox's and Mozilla's history, click here.

To see photos of the Mozilla offices and some of the people ZDNet UK met there, click here.