Interview: The future of Firefox

TR: Microsoft told TechRadar that only companies that look after users of their legacy software (like IE6) can be market leaders – how would you respond to that?

TN: [Microsoft] has a big revenue stream which is PC and Office which is endangered by the web and I sense that it's restraining innovation.

It's not true that we don't look after legacy users - we have a different kind of legacy to look at. We have put an amazing amount of effort into making sure that all webpages could be seen with Firefox and this has meant literally injecting buggy behaviour from Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 6 into Firefox and replicating their bad behaviour – let me tell you this is an extremely painful thing to do.

It's making the code much more complex…so we do have this legacy of billions of web pages that we have to be compatible with.

I'm glad they released IE8 as it's a step in the right direction and we feel we have a share in making it what it is. So even if you don't run Firefox, you have a better browser because of Mozilla because of the impact it has had on the likes of Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome.

TR: Almost 50 per cent of our readers use Firefox – you obviously appeal to a tech focused audience…

TN: That is good, but we need them to install Firefox on their less tech-savvy relative's computers. So many people are rightfully concerned about installing software because there are so many crappy pieces of software and that scare people away – obviously we need them to know that Firefox is not one of them!