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Why Chrome doesn't dazzle Mozilla's chairman

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Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 20 Nov 2008 16:01 GMT

… interesting and innovative things come out of Google and Chrome. We hope so. Good ideas move around in the browser world. New things showing in Chrome can benefit all of us. One thing d about Mozilla is, we do not have the not-invented-here syndrome.

Has it changed your thinking? Google has touted Chrome's JavaScript performance, for example. Has it lit a fire under your developers?
The JavaScript fire has been lit anyway. I'd say we've been increasing our focus on performance for some time. JavaScript performance... is equal or better than Chrome. We've seen an across-the-board change over the last six to eight months. That was in the works already.

There are some interesting things in Chrome. Everybody seems to have private-browsing features, so we will as well. We're not as convinced that this is as helpful, but it's certainly something that people are looking for.

Chrome has vanishing market share, compared to Internet Explorer. How do you view your competition with Microsoft?
Competition with Microsoft is a bit different. There's no question [that Internet Explorer] as a product is improving. Thank goodness. If 70 [percent] of the world were still using IE6, it would be much worse world for all of us.

It still does not remotely approach Firefox as a product, and we don't expect IE to challenge Firefox supremacy as the technical innovator in the near-term timeframe. We do hope to see IE standards compliance and its modern features improved. The single biggest problem now in moving the web forward is having to deal with people using back versions of IE.

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What are Mozilla's spending priorities in the future?
We have a few. The mobile space is one. Innovation is another — how to promote innovation that's not locked up in a single proprietary stack. We're not talking about giant amounts of money [but rather] experiments to find out what's important and interesting.

There are some educational and research initiatives on which we'll be increasing our focus in the next year. And there are some initiatives we're looking at in the [Mozilla] labs space. Synchronising data, not just Foxmarks data (such as bookmarks and passwords) but other data as well. That could require investments. Also, there are technologies to move the web forward. We're looking carefully at video.

Firefox 3.1 has support for the Ogg video format.
Exactly.

Is the timeline to release Firefox 3.1 in early 2009?
Yes, that's our plan.

What comes after that?
We're looking at Fennec releases [a version of Firefox for mobile devices] and at some of the things coming out of Mozilla Labs, like synchronisation of services. Will that end up as a project? Were not sure. We're also looking at Thunderbird [Mozilla's open-source email software]. Thunderbird 3 should be shipping in the first half of 2009, [bringing] add-ons and ecosystem opportunities there.

And, of course, there's more work on Firefox. The role of Firefox is to display the web as the web moves forward. We also think we're in the early stages of graphics and video, and what people do with it.

What do you think of HTML 5, the next version of the standard for displaying web pages? Will it solve the world's problems?
We're eager to see it happen. It's certainly not the panacea miracle cure, but it's important. We've spent a lot of time trying to move beyond HTML 4. We have the same issues [as earlier HTML versions] of getting it implemented in browsers.

Because it's a large specification, it's likely that only portions will get implemented. What if some browser isn't going to implement something in HTML 5, what are we doing to do to move the web forward?

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