The Mozilla CEO on His Firefox Strategy, His Google Gambit, and Working With Apple

When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent. Along the way, Wall Streeters began pressing Mozilla to go public (it won't) and Mozilla CEO John Lilly wowed scores of suits with his talks about how the open source project became a successful business. Just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June, Wired sat down with Lilly at his company headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Wired: What are the biggest changes in Firefox 3?

Lilly: It's got 15,000 improvements. It's more secure and easier to use. But, most important, it's two or three times faster. Think about all the programs we run in our browser now — like office software. When Firefox 2 was developed three years ago, we ran those applications on our desktop. So in Firefox 3 we improved the JavaScript engine and changed the way the browser handles and allocates memory.