The thrilla in Mozilla.

I've been using Firefox for quite some time. In my opinion, nothing can compares to it. NOTHING, dammit! Seriously though, it's a sleek and concise browser. It does what it's supposed to, can do most of the fancy fluff of other browsers and, yet, keeps a rather tiny resource footprint.

Fans of Firefox have most likely heard of or tried Firefox 3 Beta. I took it for a spin, and it is better in several ways. One of the chief things I noticed is that when you're downloading, you no longer need to open the "Downloads" menu. Your progress will be displayed automatically in the lower right hand corner of your browser. The option to search your browser history is useful and many of the previous quirks, such as being asked to save passwords before logging in, are ironed out.

Obviously, I'm not the only one with a hard-on for Mozilla. Wired's Michael Calore sat in on a Mozilla meeting and provides some interesting info about the company that produces the #1 most used browser. (if you lump all of the internet explorer versions together, they beat it. Firefox still commands a heavy ranking with over 35% of the user share)

Mozilla CEO John Lilly... began by citing some stats:

* Firefox currently has 160 million users, according to Mozilla.
* Russia and China are the two fastest growing locales. China has seen 6x growth since one year ago.
* 40% to 50% of the code for Firefox is written by people who don't work at Mozilla Corporation. This was surprising to me.
* The company employs about 150 people in 20 countries around the world. There are major offices in Paris and Tokyo, as well as smaller offices in China, Denmark and elsewhere.
* The Mozilla Corporation's last posted revenue 2006 was $5 million per month. That's mostly, but not all, from Google search revenue.

Lilly says the company is not trying to maximize revenue, just trying to "keep the internet open and participatory." Mozilla is actually making some changes in Firefox 3 that will end up being "revenue negative," he notes. Lilly is referring to the new address bar that searches the browser's history to find cached or recently visited pages. He expects this feature will cause users to search the web less.

I found the massive boom of Chinese users to be rather interesting. As China's user base grows it seems that Firefox could easily beat out the entire Internet Explorer series for worldwide use. That'd be pretty amazing, but could also be rather daunting for Mozilla.

All of this popularity comes with a price. Updates have to come from somewhere and, to help facilitate security, the browser is instructed to check for and automatically update itself. This keeps users from having to do it manually, many of whom will either forget or simply not care to do so. That can lead to very unsafe conditions, allowing viruses to spread and infect millions of users.

They had a recurring incident in 2005 that came to be known as "The hour of terror." Due to a programming misstep, all of the Firefox clients on the internet would check for updates at the same time. The first few times this happened, the millions of simultaneous requests would threaten to crash their servers. Everyone would wait for the event with bated breath, praying for their servers' survival.

Some might remember that firefox 3 was due to be released in summer of 2007. Well, seems that it wasn't just delayed for shits and giggles. The Mozilla team was rewriting the code and working on the backend. John Lilly, Mozilla's CEO, said that final release should occur in June of this year. Much of what makes Firefox 3 so great won't be able to be seen or realized on the surface. The article mentions that Firefox 3 beta 5 is five times faster than Internet Explorer and about 3 times faster than the latest version of Firefox 2.

As for going mobile,

The two execs also spoke about Firefox's future on mobile devices.

Everyone wanted to know: Will Firefox be coming to the iPhone anytime soon? According to the two men at the head of the table, no -- Apple's software requirements for the device are too restrictive.

Lilly: "Apple has not written a license which allows Firefox to run on the iPhone."

Schroepfer: "Android and iPhone are closed platforms. There are carriers and device manufacturers who are more open with their platform, and we'll do well there -- the Nokia N810 internet tablet, for example."

Schroepfer: "People can just take the (Firefox) code and run with it, so there's a lot happening that we don't even see until it shows up... XUL (the language in which Firefox's user interface is written) makes it easy to experiment on mobile devices. That's our main advantage on mobile platforms."
- Source

Since, it seems, that someone always manages to hack apart Apple's security schemes (unlocking the iPhone and Apple TV, anyone?), I'm sure that someone will figure out a way to get Firefox onto the iPhone. I'm also sure that Google will be interested in getting Firefox 3 onto Android. Especially as the Asian market and connection numbers continue to skyrocket. (much of Asia predominantly uses their mobile phones to access the internet) Much like Google, Mozilla seems to be the underdog that is taking over the competition.