Dan Warne07 May 2007, 7:37 AM
With Microsoft's radical changes to both the user interface and rendering core of IE7, more businesses are recontemplating moving to Firefox, according to Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker.
With Microsoft's radical changes to both the user interface and rendering core of IE7, more businesses are recontemplating moving to Firefox, according to Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker.
Dan Warne (APC): Something's up with IE7 adoption. What we see on the APC site - which would be almost exclusively tech early adopters and enthusiast readers -- is that a lot more people are still using IE6 than IE7. Do you think Microsoft made too much of a dramatic change with IE7, which might have prompted users to stick with IE7, and has that somewhat unsuccessful strategy informed your point of view on how you should move ahead with changes to Firefox? Like do you see a need to be more subtle in each evolution?
Mitchell Baker: Well a couple of things I am certainly not an expert on Microsoft. I look at IE once in a while, but it's not a browser I would ... use very much.
Dan Warne (APC): [laughs]
Mitchell Baker: Firefox was actually designed to make migration from IE very easy, so we know many people almost don't realise the change.
I have been told by some large business uses that when they look at IE7 they are re‑contemplating a switch to Firefox or support of Firefox because the move from IE6 to Firefox might, in their case, be easier than the move from IE6 to IE7.
So that's an interesting discussion point. I am not running sophisticated studies, but when you start to hear these things, which we didn't hear so much before (we just heard "oh I don't want to make a change.")
But Microsoft certainly does not inform our product plan. Not at all. We've been the leaders for a number of years now in browsers and how to help users understand the Internet.
The underlying question we look at very carefully because we have a great interest in a set of users, early adopters and power users for whom more new things constantly is a requirement and drives people and they get bored really easily. So we have a very vibrant and active and important part of the Firefox community for whom new and moving forward and new possibilities is fundamental.
Dan Warne (APC): One thing us easily bored tech early adopters love to argue about is the penetration of Firefox. How many people are using it now?
Mitchell Baker: As best we can estimate our user base it's somewhere between 75 and 100 million users ...it's a lot! These numbers aren't exact because they are all correlations of different data points, but if you take 15 per cent of the worldwide web and you look at the number of people who come to get security updates and try to correlate that's about what it looks like. Every rule of thumb that we can find suggests something like that.
Dan Warne (APC): So is it tricky to keep everyone happy?
Mitchell Baker: Most of those people are not power users and don't value constant change above complexity. Many of those people really don't know - even what's Firefox and the what's the chrome of Firefox versus the dynamic content that comes from a web page.
So that's very complex and very frightening to people so the issues that inform our product planning are how to continue to expose the richness of the web which is changing all the time; how to bring the new ideas that are early adopter advocate community wants to see and is producing, and at the same time how to continue to ship a product that the general consumer can use?
That is what informs our thinking constantly and it's quite separate from what decision Microsoft may or may not make.
Of course we use the add-on system to meet many of those needs and so I think you will see more and more new ideas show up as add-ons that we may even develop or promote to test for experiments like The Coop to see for people who are early adopters or interested in something, what really works, what works well and how do we take the best of that and put it in a core Firefox so the general consumer can actually approach it without being terrified.
Read more of the interview with Mitchell Baker: