Mozilla Foundation Director of Engineering Chris Hofmann, who was an early Netscape staffer, sat down to discuss Mozilla’s impact and its chances for success where so many others have been crushed.

A decade ago, Netscape was one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley. Today, a visit to its sprawling campus is a stark reminder of what happens to those who challenge Microsoft. Most of the buildings are occupied by other companies, while most of those still occupied by AOL, which bought Netscape in 1998, are empty. A huge likeness of Mozilla, Netscape’s dinosaur mascot, used to stand guard outside the cafeteria but a few months ago was put in storage.

The Mozilla Foundation (www.mozilla.org) was established out of Netscape’s ashes in 2003 to develop open-source alternatives in Internet browsing, email, and Web development. Its time arrived in summer 2004 when Internet Explorer experienced a rash of security issues. The free Mozilla Firefox browser became the alternative of choice, and according to analyst reports peaked at more than 12 percent of the browser market. It retreated after experiencing security issues of its own this spring, but backed by corporate sponsors including Microsoft rivals IBM and Oracle, as well as a rabid community of volunteer developers, QA testers, and enthusiasts (www.spreadfirefox.com), Mozilla has regained its footing and crept out of the loch for good.

Mozilla Foundation Director of Engineering Chris Hofmann, who was an early Netscape staffer, sat down to discuss Mozilla’s impact and its chances for success where so many others have been crushed.

The Mozilla Foundation has already accomplished its stated mission of preserving choice and innovation on the internet. What is the ultimate goal of the foundation?

I think that preserving choice is a moving target. Innovation has got to be a continuing thing if it’s going to be useful to people. There is still a lot of innovative and creative work to be done in building an Internet that’s easier for people to use. A lot of usability work is still in front of us and there is a lot of work to do with security. We’re very interested in building a better platform that people can build applications on that’s cross-platform and doesn’t lock people into specific platform implementations. Those are all things we have to work on if we’re going to continue to have viable technology that preserves people’s choice.

So how would you envision the end game for the Mozilla Foundation?

I’m not sure that there is an endgame. We want to continue to make better software and to have it be used by more people. We’ve been pretty successful in doing that over the past few years. We’re going to do everything we can to stay on that trend.

The Mozilla name dates back to Mosaic, the original Web interface from when the Internet was undiscovered country. How much of that spirit still exists on the Internet?

There is a great deal of experimentation that’s been kind of re-igniting in the last couple of years. The promise of the Internet was that we’d have all kinds of applications that could make accessing information a lot easier and faster. There was kind of a stagnation of that when Microsoft started to take a larger percentage of browser market share. But with things like Google Maps and Gmail, we’ve seen renewed interest in using standards-based Web programming methods and languages to create applications that work across browsers and can be compelling to users while providing information to them in ways that are easier to use.

It’s interesting that both of the innovations you just mentioned came from Google.