Mozilla CTO: Brendan Eich

Dan Farber: Brendan thanks for joining me.

Brendan Eich: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Dan Farber: You have a very challenging role as a CTO of a company that is open source. In fact 40 percent of the code, I understand, comes from the outside and not your own staff people. So, how do you manage when you have thousands of contributors?

Brendan Eich: Well, it is sort of like an Amish barn raising. We can't compel anybody in that volunteer cohort to do what they don't want to do so the idea is to set a vision, steer course, and let people decide at the finer levels of barn raising what wall goes where, what door goes where. That is what I do, I delegate a lot and that is how open source really works. It is not a matter of me being the master controller.

Dan Farber: Well, if there is no master controller, or someone not in charge, how does anything ever get done? Are you all just sitting around talking about," should the wall go here? Should it go there?" Now, I know that you've made a lot of progress because Firefox 3 came out; Firefox 3.1 is on its way. There must be something more to it?

Brendan Eich: There is. There is a basic floor plan. Barns all look a like, browsers still look alike, even from ten years ago but we've moved the needle forward with Firefox and there is competition. We are doing things like private browsing, we are making tabbed browsing work better, we are increasing privacy features, and we're increasing performance certainly.

Dan Farber: Now as a CTO for a company that has a very popular browser, I think you are at 20% market share now, and as I was looking at some other numbers, there have been 700 million downloads of Firefox over the last several years, since it came out of Netscape in 1998 I assume?

Brendan Eich: Firefox was actually in 2004, but Mozilla spun out or was set up in 1998.

Dan Farber: So, again back to this issue of managing all the code when some of the code comes from the outside, you have all these contributors, do you have some systems in place, technical systems in place for collaboration, for management of all of those millions lines of code?

Brendan Eich: We do. I write roadmap documents in blog posts that try to set direction on critical points. And through delegation, through a network of coders -- that we have come to call the super reviewers but it is a larger group of that -- Code review is an important part of our process. Everyone reads code before it committed to our source tree. That helps us see who the new talent is coming from anywhere and we try to recruit that talent and give them more authority and go from there. A lot of it is based on delegation but the overall technical direction is based on my road maps. Participation is key, so we are not just doing top down or bottom up, we are doing both.

Dan Farber: When you build these road maps obviously you're getting input from a lot of different people in the community, how do you decide on which feature to bet on, given you have multiple competing features that you could be developing?

Brendan Eich: One of the things that we did with Firefox was make the add-on architecture so people could scratch their own itches without the browser becoming this over complicated user interface with two many menu items and buttons. A lot of what we try to do is let the add-on developers scratch their itches and see what really is good. We look at the competition, we look at actual users. We get feedback from real users because our main focus is the user. We don't care particularly about search or other web services; we really care about the whole web useful, including search. When we look at what the user wants, we want performance, we see people wanting privacy, they want ease of use, they want good organization of where they have been and where they are going, not necessarily bookmarks but we do that too. So we are trying to make the user be the king.

Dan Farber: One of the areas where the browser is missing in action, to a large degree, is on mobile devices, is that an important project on your road map?

Brendan Eich: It is and we have had a project called, Fennec, codenamed after a little Brazilian fox with big ears, very cute, as our mobile browser. We really do want to reach people for whom the mobile platform may be the primary way they get to the web. So far it has been a fragmented world for them; it is not necessarily the open web that we all see from our desktops. We would like to heal that rift and unify the web.

Dan Farber: So what is the status of a mobile Firefox?

Brendan Eich: It is coming up principally on these Nokia devices you may have heard about, these smart phones. It is going very well. We are poised to launch it next year. The performance is getting better and better all the time. We are also making it so you can synchronize data with your desktop Firefox. You may know in Firefox 3 when you search, you just type a few letters and what we call the "Awesome Bar" knows where you want to go almost magically. That data could be synced privately between just you and your phone and used so that you only have to type a few keys on your mobile phone. I know I don't like fat fingering too many keys into my phone, so the less the better.

Dan Farber: Microsoft has a browser and they have about 70 percent market share, obviously they've woken up to what you have accomplished at Firefox, with Firefox. Recently Google, which is a source of your revenue, has come up with a browser called Chrome. There seems to be a raging debate in the industry about which browser is better and faster. Obviously you think yours is better and faster but I have seen some tests recently in which the Chrome browser is faster. Is this a temporary situation?

Brendan Eich: It's really a neck and neck race. There is a contest going on not only between Google and Mozilla but also Apple to have the fastest JavaScript engine, to have the best performance on various benchmarks. This is great. Competition is good for users and for web developers. Another focus for us, especially for me is the web developers, the set of users that actually web content. We are right in there, we are slugging it out. On the Google benchmarks their JavaScript engine is faster, on Apple's benchmarks we're faster than Google currently. It is going to vary, you are going to see it go back and forth, so it is only going to go up which is the best thing for developers and that is what we are focused on.

Dan Farber: So, performance is going to improve because there is increased competition but is perceptible to the user itself? It sounds like the processor wars of yesteryear, where everyone said; " how many megahertz or gigahertz do you have?" It turned out what people cared about was their performance per watt.

Brendan Eich: That is true. There is an element of benchmark marketing here and you can go too far as you could with clocking your CPU. We want to measure all performance including what the user perceives. We've done video studies where you can see a page load; you can see the user say "oh it is ready!" We have noticed that some of these benchmarks don't actually represent that experience. We're paying attention to all levels of competition but we have to pay attention to benchmarks of course.

Dan Farber: So, when can we expect to see a browser, an open source browser like Firefox that does more that just browsing but encompasses applications as well as the communications and collaboration, more collaboration for example in Firefox?

Brendan Eich: We have two focuses at Mozilla. One is Firefox and that is the main focus. We also have a Mozilla messaging wholly owned subsidiary that is focused on messaging. They're building up Thunderbird maintaining it, evolving it and they are also looking at messaging as a whole because email is even older than the web and is a very challenging protocol and it is a sort of store and forward model that is very susceptible because of its economics to spam and things like that. We are focused through a division of two organizations on email and messaging as a separate project but I expect to see cross fertilization. One of the thoughts that has come to the fore and we do observe is people do use webmail more and more. They do not need a fat mail client. Some people like it, some people don't. We think the web could subsume mail and we see this certainly with mobile devices with people texting and using other forms of messaging. With Firefox and our add-on architecture we are poised to sort of embrace all of these things and incorporate whatever is successful among these as built in features of Firefox.

Dan Farber: Mozilla has been a very innovative company, obviously a lot of accomplishments but how do you maintain a culture of innovation especially given you have a very distributed set of people working for you?

Brendan Eich: That is a great question. We have both a distributed organization and of course Firefox 3 we are getting mature. The innovators dilemma comes to mind. We try to do things through Mozilla Labs for instance that are disruptive and we see what sticks. We are willing to take chances even with our own core brand. That is necessary to continue to succeed. We are going to keep doing that. Mobile browsing, some of the projects from labs like Ubiquity, which is a command line for the web, and Weave, which is a way of storing all of your browser data and sharing it with your mobile phone, are going to allow us to keep innovating outside of the constraints of the browser.

Dan Farber: Brendan thanks so much for speaking with me.

Brendan Eich: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Dan Farber: I have been speaking with Brendan Eich who is the CTO of Mozilla, for CIO Sessions I am Dan Farber thanks for watching.