Firefox’s Mobile Efforts — Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker

Dan Warne at APC did a fairly comprehensive interview with Mitchell Baker, the CEO of the Mozilla Foundation. She said that Mozilla is committed to getting the browser on mobile, but said it was a long-term plan, reiterating what was said by the mobile project head Doug Turner a month ago.

“We decided that the right thing to do is to look first at the technology and look at our core technology and really tune it so that it’s best suited for that. We are at work on that now, however it will take a while,” said Baker. Part of the problem is a heavy code-base, something Mozilla will be working on.

As for what they are doing in mobile: “We have an experiment underway which is clearly a PC-centric experiment related to mobiles (so this is not a pure mobile strategy), but we are experimenting with the relationship between Firefox users and their mobile devices. We know people like Firefox because of the add-ons and the customisation and the ability to get particular information that you want through Firefox and extensions…So the experiment that’s underway is called Joey – we are looking at how you can take information that people like to access and deliver it to a mobile device. Clearly you can go to the web and you can SMS yourself various things … but what else could be done? If you have Firefox, you already have the ability to customise it and gather certain kinds of information, so what could you do with that so that being a Firefox user makes your mobile experience better.” It could have a server-solution like Opera Mini, but is still in the experimental stage rather than a fully-fledged commercial product (via LinuxDevices)

Comments have been disabled for this post