Dan Warne07 May 2007, 7:37 AM
Is there new love between Microsoft and the Firefox developers? The new caring, sharing Microsoft made a big show of inviting the Firefox developers into its Vista compatibility lab during development of the mega-OS. We asked the Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker how that went down.
Is there new love between Microsoft and the Firefox developers? The new caring, sharing Microsoft made a big show of inviting the Firefox developers into its Vista compatibility lab during development of the mega-OS. We asked the Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker how that went down.
 Anti-crust: not strictly part of the legal settlement, the IE cake Microsoft sent to Mozilla upon shipping Firefox 2.0 put frosting on an icy relationship... |
Dan Warne (APC): Also an interesting thing that happened a little while ago was Microsoft's very public invitation for Firefox people to come into the Vista compatibility labs. I remember asking Microsoft at the time if they could give me more background to that and they said to me something along the lines of "well we've extended an invitation to our competitor and if they choose to accept our invitation well that's up to them, but if they don't it's not our problem." Do you have any comment on how that went?
Mitchell Baker: I think it is fair to say that Microsoft did make an effort and it was welcome. There are many areas in which we would like to work well with Microsoft and certainly I think Vista's compatibility there might be some legal requirements there on their part as well, but whether there are or not they did extend that offer and we did take them up on it and they did host Mozilla time up there, which I think was useful for us; and I think that's worth some credit.
Microsoft is back in the browser space now and has to pay attention to the web again so we'll probably see them in the standards bodies and that's probably where we will see - not those particular people in the Vista lab and I think they did make an effort and they did work so that we could get up there and do some testing on Vista - but I think we will see in the standards bodies whether Microsoft continues to push its own proprietary technology at the expense of open and operable technologies. That happens a lot in standards bodies meetings. That is where their true colours will show and we'll see what that is probably pretty soon.
Dan Warne (APC): That's interesting. Were there any issues with Firefox and Vista because I mean I was running all Vista betas and I installed Firefox on all of them and they basically worked fine.
Mitchell Baker: Yay! We did do some work - I am trying to remember it was; I think there are some installation differences that are required.
Dan Warne (APC): That would be probably be likely given all the changes to permissions and stuff in Vista.
Mitchell Baker: Yes and so - yes actually the basic product worked extraordinarily well we were proud of that, but there has been a set of tuning and installation and I think there was one other category and those things came out and - two or three I think. So not at the 2.0 release time, but we've made a lot of Vista-related changes, although again not in the basic functionality, but just pieces around it.
Read more of the interview with Mitchell Baker: