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On Google and Mobile browsing

There are tensions with sometime partner, sometime competitor Google. Lilly is scrupulously polite when he comments that "Chrome has made our life more complicated but I think it has made us better; Firefox 3.5 is better because of our competition."

He’s rather more outspoken when he calls Google’s celebration of the Web as an application platform premature. "I think that Eric Schmidt and Vic Gundotra [of Google] overstated when they said "the Web has won". I felt it’s the American picture of George W Bush on the aircraft carrier with the banner saying 'mission accomplished'."

It’s not just the decade that some estimate will pass before HTML 5 is fully ratified as a standard; Lilly is concerned that the really important new platform – smartphones – could continue down the proprietary route, with carriers and manufacturers keeping things so controlled that they stifle developers. "On mobile right now; the Web is in not a good shape, exactly," he cautions.

Don't blame Mozilla for not moving faster to the mobile platform; Lilly says it was a strategic issue. "We get criticised a lot for being late to mobile. People say 'What the hell happened? What were you doing?' and what I say is that we waited and we waited for two reasons." The first is a question of user demand – and user expertise. "If you look at the rise of Firefox, it has always been a consumer revolt; an expression of dissatisfaction of living with what you got on your PC. I’m very happy that people can express that, but to be able to express a revolt you have to understand your choices. In this case you have to understand how to download an app and install it and then use it and keep using it. But until the App Store happened last year, almost nobody in the world had ever installed apps on a phone."

The Fennec Browser The second and more important reason was what Mozilla wanted the Fennec project to deliver. "We didn't want to do Firefox mobile, we just wanted Firefox. You don’t want a crappy mobile browser, you want the Web. You want the Web but smaller, you want the Web on your device. So we had to wait a bit until we thought device power could support the real Web. I think we're close now."

That doesn't guarantee that the open standards Web will transform the mobile experience; Lilly warns that there could just as easily be a "bad future" and he views the iPhone as a distinctly mixed blessing. "Even though Safari is great, there’s been a little renaissance of bespoke specific apps - which I think are beautiful, I really love them. But it’s a pain in the ass to build for iPhone and for Android, for Palm. From my point of view here the Web must be the winner here, the Web must be the unifying platform; but just like when they put the 'mission accomplished' banner up there's still a lot of work for people to do for a long time to make that happen, because there’s too many entrenched interests that want a closed system. Apple has got control of the iPhone very tight and now everyone is trying to be just like Apple; the RIM store, the Microsoft Windows Mobile store. Right at a time when the Web should be winning on mobile, everyone is clenching to get control of the stacks again. I think it's far from assured that we’re in a place that gets us to the Web as platform fastest."

Next: Cloud busting, extensions and identity

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