Exclusive vnunet.com interview: Mozilla's Tristan Nitot

At this year's LinuxWorld show at Olympia vnunet.com caught up with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, to discuss the organisation's plans for the future.

Nitot worked for Netscape until 2003, but has been involved in the Mozilla project for much longer and managed the launch of Mozilla in Europe.

Formerly a keen skydiver when not slaving over a keyboard, he enjoys vintage motorcycles and digital photography.

The browser market is hotting up again and you're facing increased competition from the likes of Opera. What's the mood at Mozilla about this?

These are interesting times. At Mozilla our mission statement is to bring back choice and innovation to the web, and we always work to this goal. We're a huge project with thousands of individuals, and working to achieve this goal brings us together.

As such we are looking to see more of Opera. It's a good product which is web standards compliant, something that's very important for the future of the web. I don't believe there's one web browser for everyone. If Opera works best for you, then use Opera. If Mozilla works best for you, then use Mozilla.

What about the threat from Microsoft? How do you rate its browser development?

We'll be seeing Internet Explorer 7 sooner than expected; it was only due to come out with Windows Vista but Microsoft changed its mind. That's good news for the customer, because they get the benefit.

The web is maybe 10 years old, if you take the Netscape IPO as your starting point. IE really came in with Windows 95 and there was tremendous competition for four years, culminating in IE5 and by this time Microsoft had the vast majority of people.

Then for two years only one release, IE6, and that only had slight changes like improvements to the web standards system. Other than that Microsoft's done nothing, apart from Windows XP SP2 and some users still don't feel comfortable installing it for fear of application incompatibility.

Once Microsoft controlled the internet entry point, its interest in innovation ceased and it went back to making money from Office and Windows.

There's nothing wrong with that in a business sense. But we're not part of a business, just one part of a project. We thought the web needed choice and innovation.

• Video link: Tristan Nitot on Mozilla's mission
• Video link: Tristan Nitot on open source security

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