Firefox decade: Microsoft's IE humbled by a dogged upstart. Native next?

Browser turns 10 today. El Reg talks to CTO Gal

How Mozilla fights the strict ecosystem rules

Mozilla’s chief technology officer, Andreas Gal, told The Reg in an interview:

Today is an exceptionally competitive market and we are competing against some of the largest and most well-resourced development operations in the world ... it’s much harder to gain or maintain market share than it was, even before Google entered with Chrome.

Firefox's early gains were secured by the fact Mozilla began making the web a better thing to consume using its browser. Mozilla was one of the first to contribute to HTML5, a standard which has only just been completed at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

“We started unlocking capabilities that didn’t exist in IE,” Gal said. “There was no pressure on Microsoft to innovate. That was one of the mechanisms that undid them.”

But 10 years on, with zero per cent growth versus growth for Chrome and stabilisation for Internet Explorer, Mozilla must surely fret. Chrome is growing at Firefox’s expense – diverting users.

Arguably, the desktop is less of a concern given that the PC market has stalled. Growth is in devices, where Mozilla reckons Firefox has its future with Firefox OS.

Firefox OS isn’t a browser-browser, it’s an operating-system browser – a Linux kernel with the walls removed between the application called “the browser.”

According to Gal, the battle is new but the issue remains the same: breaking the stranglehold of two monopoly suppliers – Apple, which owns the iOS developer and device market, and Google, which owns Android.

Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal. Image credit: Mozilla

“Microsoft controls all aspects of the [IE] technology stack,” Gal said. “iOS and Android are the same today: highly controlled ecosystems where the owner of that ecosystem sets the rules and sets the technologies – and that’s what we are trying to fight against.”

He added: “Microsoft and Apple and Google’s goal is to make money for their shareholders, which is not wrong but creates a different incentive for us. Our goal is to make a browser for you.”

Unlike 10 years ago, Apple and Google aren’t being smug about their market share in the way that Microsoft had once been with IE – building a piece of software that consumers could take or leave but mostly had to take.

Apple and Google have clouds of developers willingly throwing themselves into building native apps for their respective mobes.

How does Mozilla begin to convince these masses to slowly break away and think outside the native app?

Gal reckoned Mozilla will win by building a better mobile web through its work on standards and APIs that it then implements and slots into mobile.

“Many of the APIS that are on the desktop today didn’t exist 10 years ago in IE. In the mobile ecosystem the same problem exists ... The data store API [and] performance improvements around Javascript didn’t exist three to four years ago, so it was important to make a compelling mobile experience on the web,” Gal told us.

Also, he added, by offering application authors cross platform using open standards and data portability so they don’t build versions of their apps for iOS and Android.

“You can bring HTML5 not just to Firefox OS but also iOS and Android users. If you want to take advantage of massive scale of the web you need to have developer tool integration,” he said.

That’s where Mozilla comes in.