‘Weird’ Mozilla marching into mainstream

"This kind of place is pretty unusual for Mozilla, " says the open-source web community's principal evangelist, Tristan Nitot. Having just finished a speech at this year's DigiWorld Summit in Montpellier, France, Nitot – who is also Mozilla Europe founder and president – is more than a little uncomfortable in these surroundings. "I bought a new shirt for the occasion; my shoes shine," he says.

Such small sartorial changes are all part of Nitot’s attempts to push Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile platform into becoming “the first mobile platform” globally, ousting Android and leaving iOS in its wake in the process. “We basically want to change the rules of the game,” says Nitot.

All of 15 years on from the creation of "the Mozilla Project" when Netscape released the source code for its browser online, and nine years since the release of Firefox 1.0, the open-web project centred on a global volunteer community of "technologists, thinkers and builders" is still, as Nitot puts it, trying to build "the internet the word needs".

Having spent a decade helping to decimate Explorer’s grip on the browser market, Nitot and Mozilla now hope to do the same in the mobile space.

“We’re a non-profit organisation, which is something you need to remember because if you don’t you’ll think we’re weird people and what we do doesn’t make sense,” he says. “We’re not about money – we have a mission.”

Mission
That mission now involves Nitot visiting places like the telecoms and internet-focused DigiWorld Summit hosted by think tank IDATE, to "meet carriers and telcos" such as Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom.

“Carriers are a different breed and I don’t mean this in a bad way,” he says. “We don’t have the same DNA.”

Firefox OS though, is seen by these companies as “a great chance to break out of the duopoly of Android and Apple on the mobile market”.

What's intriguing in all of this of course, is Mozilla's relationship with Android creators, Google. While the Mozilla Foundation, created in 2003, is a non-profit organisation, Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity which made nearly €230 million last year, 90 per cent of which came from Google.

All profits are invested directly back into the “software factory” that Nitot describes as allowing Mozilla to release “probably 400 different versions of Firefox because of the combinations of languages and platforms” at a rate of once every “six weeks”. “[Google] buy traffic from us for their search engine,” explains Nitot, who adds that “we’re different but they’re kind of the same family – web people I would say”.

How then, will they take a challenge to the mobile OS superiority from an organisation they are essentially funding until at least the end of next year, before the current traffic agreement is said to run out?

For Nitot, it is just another area of competition between the two. “They have Chrome, we have Firefox. They have Android and we have Firefox OS. We’re competing on different levels. It’s totally fine,” he says.

On the more technical side of the plan to become global mobile OS leader, Mozilla must first sway developers tired of the “awful” task of writing an application for one platform before “writing it for a second platform with a different language”.

“We want the web to be the platform,” says Nitot. “I want developers to write HTML5 applications that will run everywhere – on Android, on iOS, on Firefox OS and pretty much everything,” adding confidently: “If we manage to get enough momentum everyone will align.”

One particular area of difference between Mozilla and Google which Nitot is keen to emphasise is in relation to privacy.

He says that Mozilla stores “a very small amount of data” as “we try not to know about our users”.

'Wizard of Oz moment'
In fact, he says Mozilla intends to educate users on how their data is tracked online through a new Firefox add-on called Lightbeam. "There are certain people online who basically track you from website to website," says Nitot, and Lightbeam represents a "Wizard of Oz moment, where you see what's behind the curtain".

Not referring openly to any company in particular, he says, “You get a free email account where you login and so . . . they read your email.”

He continues, “They know what you think because that’s what you search. They know where you go . . . they have maps.” Laughing slightly, he adds: “They know a lot of things and people keep getting the same email address and same web browser from the same place.”

Privacy debates aside, Nitot is then off to further the case for Firefox OS at another talk, but not before delighting in the recent launch of the Irish language version of Firefox.

“Frankly I don’t think it makes a lot of sense economically to make an Irish version of Firefox, I don’t have the numbers I can’t say, but it doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s a matter of culture, I’m French and I put a high price on culture.”