Dan Warne07 May 2007, 7:37 AM
Most tech enthusiasts have wondered why web browsers on mobile phones suck so much. Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker has been thinking about it too, and looking at how Firefox can be ported to mobile platforms.
Most tech enthusiasts have wondered why web browsers on mobile phones suck so much. Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker has been thinking about it too, and looking at how Firefox can be ported to mobile platforms.
Dan Warne (APC): Something I wanted to ask about is one area that Firefox hasn't seemed to have delved into much is putting Firefox on mobile devices and Opera obviously has a pretty good spot in that space and even Microsoft to an extent. Is there any move in that direction?
Mitchell Baker: Yes it is a long‑term move though -- it is not in the next weeks or months. The Mozilla Foundation's mission in life is to improve Internet experience and that is increasingly on devices other than PCs. If we're not there then we won't be able to live the kind of vision that we helped grow.
So that needs to happen. We had a small project looking at it but we decided that the right thing to do is to look first at the technology and look at our core technology and really tune it so that it's best suited for that. We are at work on that now, however it will take a while.
We are also looking at how to reflect the richness of the entire web on a small device with the current constraints and that one we don't know. There is no easy answer for that because the web is growing and the functionalities of the web are growing. We're looking closely at that one.
We have an experiment underway which is clearly a PC-centric experiment related to mobiles (so this is not a pure mobile strategy), but we are experimenting with the relationship between Firefox users and their mobile devices. We know people like Firefox because of the add-ons and the customisation and the ability to get particular information that you want through Firefox and extensions.
So the experiment that's underway is called Joey - we are looking at how you can take information that people like to access and deliver it to a mobile device. Clearly you can go to the web and you can SMS yourself various things ... but what else could be done? If you have Firefox, you already have the ability to customise it and gather certain kinds of information, so what could you do with that so that being a Firefox user makes your mobile experience better.
Dan Warne (APC): So are you talking about a kind of a back end service solution that helps pre-format content for mobiles etc?
Mitchell Baker: It's got a couple of pieces, it's got a server piece, it's got a little client piece that sort of thing and that one we'll launch in labs pretty soon. I think there's information up there about it now so that will launch as an experiment, not necessarily as a product plan, but as a way to start to get information because right now in many countries the user of a mobile device interacts with a carrier and not directly with the software vendor.
So even if we had a great product to do what we do best which is to touch human beings there's no current way to get that on most devices. Another thing that we're trying to sort through and maybe if that doesn't change then maybe this ability to get different kinds of information would make sense, we're not sure.
Opera is probably better suited to us as a supplier to carriers because our DNA is really very consumer and individual-focused. So all of those things have led us to try this experiment whilst we tweak our technology and see what things look like.
Dan Warne (APC): Firefox has a bit of a reputation - I'm not sure whether it's right or wrong - of having a hefty code‑base as a renderer and I think that largely might have come about when Apple chose the KHTML rendering core used in the Linux Konqueror browser. They said at the time reason they chose KHTML over Gecko [Firefox's rendering core] was because it was very lightweight. So is it true that Firefox internally is quite hefty and might be a bit difficult to shoehorn onto a mobile device?
Mitchell Baker: Oh well all of them are difficult to shoehorn onto a mobile device, so we should be clear about that. Opera has done a pretty good job of getting something useful on to a mobile device, but it's not a full fledged and doesn't have the capabilities of Firefox. That's hard to get on any mobile device so that's a separate question.
But yes I think it's fair to say that the actual and better piece - it's called WebKit by Apple - that particular piece is easier to work with currently than our analogous technology.
Now some of that is that when you get our analogous technology you get a whole bunch of other things that allow the creation of the communities that we do. So for extensions and the language of XUL and a whole range of other things come with our technology.
So some of that is just more capability but some of it is that it is a smaller piece and probably more approachable and that's part of what we're looking at when we say before we really launch into a better space we know we have these advantages that I think are probably unmatchable - building that kind of community that we talked about - it's probably unmatchable.
But even given that we should really work harder and smarter to make the core as approachable and easy so that it's easy to develop and you get all the other benefits that come with Firefox and Mozilla technology.
Read more of the interview with Mitchell Baker: