This is the transcript of the chat with John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

I didn’t make it on time so I missed some of the first questions. The transcript starts with a partial answer by John Thanks to David, here’s the full transcript:

Firefox 3 is being released much later than was expected (similarly to most previous versions). How can you promise time-driven release of 3.1 later this year?

Well, we can’t. Time estimates are a best guess, but generally we do the best we can do to interesting releases in as timely a way as we can. We know that there’s something next after 3 that’s before the Mozilla 2 workand Firefox 4 and so 3.1 (or 3.next as we call it sometimes) is that, and our best guess is that we can do it sometime this year.

With so many people moving toward mobile devices in place of their PC, do you foresee the mobile project taking over as the primary vehicle for Firefox?

That’s a super-interesting question. Myself, I find that I use the mobile internet more and more with my iPhone & the Safari browser. Wwhen I travel, especially in Asia - Japan and China -, it feels like sometimes the predominant way of interacting with the web. Having said that, I think that PCs are very unlikely to go away or even decline. So I think of it as an addition of a major form factor, not a replacement. But there’s no question that it’s extremely important for us.

Hi John, Firefox has grown so tremendously in the past 2 years.  How do you think about scaling product services like Support or to phrase it another way, how does a resource constrained (relative to competitors) project like Mozilla try to serve 150+ million users with features like support/troubleshooting?

Well, we think about how to scale and how to leverage with every single thing we do. I think the work we’re doing here is a start — a major start-, and I think that ultimately we can only look to the same ways we’ve done things to date — or, rather, the same types of things.

What we’re doing with SUMO is trying to empower lots of people to contribute and really to help each other. It’s similar to what we’re doing with localizations and in the code itself. We have a pretty small playbook, honestly - one basic play- but it’s a very good play, as it’s inclusive of the whole world. So figuring out how to help people help each other is the key.

Do you think Mozilla’s outlook has become too Firefox-centric? Are there any plans to branch out and put (more) resources into other projects (e.g. Thunderbird) or new endeavors?

OK, this is going to take me a bit of time to answer. *stretches typing fingers*

2 years ago, we had about 10 or 11 per cent of the world’s internet users using Firefox and about 40 people working for Mozilla and a volunteer contributor base who was contributing 40% or so of the code for the products (Thunderbird & Firefox, although Firefox community has been more active).

What was clear there is that Firefox mattered in real ways to *lots* of people and that they were building things on top of it that nobody expected, like the 5,000 extensions, for example. And it was also clear that there was going to be renewed competition and innovation in browsers, and, eventually, on mobile, and so we just weren’t staffed appropriately for the new environment –. It was all we could do to keep things running, so focus on the most leveraged thing — Firefox — was necessary.

Now we’re getting to a place that’s better — Firefox 3 is a very good product, I think — best browser that I’ve ever used– and we have a team that can engage in web standards work, evangelism, etc. So life is a lot better there, but even 6 months ago, it was hard for us to really spend a lot of time on Thunderbird. That’s why we created Mozilla Messaging, and seeded it with $3M. That’s the same amount of money that MoFo was started with, incidentally. And now I think we’re seeing the beginnings of the results of that — we have a coherent, engaged, excited team working on reinventing mail and they’ve just released an alpha. So I think there’s going to be a ton of great stuff there.

At the same time, we’ve been building a mobile team and I’d expect to see a lot there plus are doing work on Mozilla 2, not to mention embedding APIs so that Gecko can be more useful for everyone *and* have been building out a more global set of folks — bringing in more people in Europe, more in China, building a lab of folks in New Zealand. So from my perspective we’re already been doing a lot more than just Firefox and will do more — I think we’re at a better size now and more able to do more projects without compromising on Firefox, which to be very honest, is where the majority of our leverage and ability to matter in the industry comes from.

So no, I don’t think we were over-focused on it — that was necessary, but yes, there are other things we’re interested in.

Mozilla has celebrated 10 years of Mozilla, where do you think will Mozilla and Firefox be when we celebrate 25 years of Mozilla? :)

Well, I’d mostly like to get to the Firefox 3 release first.

But after that, I think the goal is to be here for 50 or 100 years because the web is the central innovation of our times. It changes everything, and will for a long time to come. So Mozilla, in my view, has a role to keep the web as robust and open and participatory as possible in ways that can’t come from purely commercial companies (many of which are contributing well).

What’s the toughest thing about being CEO of a leading open source, free software project like Mozilla?  Rallying the troops?  Sustaining the company?  Edging out competitors?

I’ve been thinking about that a fair bit lately, as you might imagine. The funniest thing about it is that every morning when I wake up, as soon as my eyes open, and sometimes before, I ask myself “What’s the most important thing for Mozilla to get done today?”. It always changes.

Depends a lot on what’s happening but I think the toughest thing right now is that we’re not like a traditional organization in any way we do things differently, we communicate differently, we care about different outcomes, so as a result, we’re not particularly well understood.

I’d like to be able to communicate the messiness -the wonderful messiness of the organization- in a way that’s easier for others to understand but I’ll tell you truthfully that I feel very lucky to be in a position like this where I can help figure out a ton of other very smart people figure out how to make a difference in the world.

Not sure if that answers the question, but next.

(David Tenser: if it didn’t I’m sure there will be a follow-up :))

Can you please specify when we can expect Firefox 3 to be released?

Nope, that’s an engineering decision not a CEO decision (that’s one of the ways we’re different). But right now the RC1 is in the world and we’re watching bug reports very closely. I think we’ll make calls on whether an RC2 is needed or not next week and that will have an effect on when we ship what we’ll call final.

Sorry not to be more specific than that, but that’s how we roll here: we’ll ship when it’s good, not before.
(But hopefully soon!)

(David Tenser: Makes sense to most here I think)

Your favorite Firefox add-on?

Lately I like PicLens an awful lot. It’s just a killer UI for looking at Flickr pictures, especially of my family.

Do you write code for Mozilla? if so, how much, and where?

No, I don’t, and all Firefox users everywhere should be thankful for that. I’ve got a computer science background but my master’s is in Human Computer Interaction, so I really care more about user interfaces and how software is used. So I do argue with beltzner and alex and mconnor and johnath a bunch about UI
but don’t code. :-)

Going forward, what do you see as the biggest threat to the open web?

There are a bunch, of course. A couple that come to mind:

- Flash and Silverlight. They’re great, useful, tools, but not really the open web. I’ll end up installing Silverlight on my own system so that I can watch the Olympics this summer, but it’s not really what I want.
I think that with canvas, SVG, etc, we should be able to do just as well or better
- Video and codecs. We’re trying to figure out exactly what to do with <video>, and codec ownership is the trickiest problem to solve, so hopefully we can make progress this year on it.
- Mobile web (bonus 3rd threat!). The mobile web is at risk now because it’s largely controlled by carriers, and, to some extent, manufacturers. But nobody wants the mobile web. What everyone wants is the web, but in your pocket and wireless. The “real” web is special because it’s open at every level and so we need to make sure that mobile is like that, too.

Mozilla seems to be more successful in Europe than in the US in terms of market share. Why do you think that is?

Lots of reasons, really, not least of which is awesome efforts by dtenser, tristan, pascal, peterv, gandalf, etc. But more structurally:
1) We align well with European values around openness, shared decision making, etc.
2) We’re not Microsoft, and don’t have as American-centric a view as many companies (I hope).
3) I have a feeling that Netscape did quite well historically in places like Germany, and think that’s helped us, too but i suspect there are many more reasons.

How do you see Labs developing over the next few years?

I have great hopes for labs. For a few years I worked in Apple Labs which was a traditional model: lots of folks in a big building drawing crazy stuff on whiteboards and getting something into a product every 4 or 5 years (see: QuickTime).

That’s very traditional, and not very effective. In Mozilla Labs, the hope is to take that model and mash it up with open source, with user generated content, with add-ons and try to *enable* lots of people who aren’t at Mozilla to do lots of crazy and great things. Weave is an example of a project where we’re doing infrastructure to let others build great stuff. So I hope we can start lots of little infrastructure projects  that let others do great and amazing stuff. That would be success.

(David Tenser: Thank you very much for the session john! I appreciate the time you set aside for sharing your thoughts and visions.)

Totally! this was great. Going to give my fingers a rest.