CUTC 2006 Day 1 – Mike Shaver (Mozilla Foundation)
Posted by Skrud at Friday, January 13th 2006 at 8:35am
CUTC is finally underway. We left ridiculously early in the morning with Guillaume picked up Eric, Matt and myself. We finally arrived at the Sheraton Parkway North around 12:30pm, signed into the conference and attended a keynote by Hannah Cho on Computer culture and society. It was okay.
Following that was a seminar by Mike Shaver, one of the founding members of the Mozilla Foundation. He offered some insight into the current technology and renewed interest in web browsers. Firefox now has approximately 10% of the web surfing population, which is a pretty significant portion. In order to maintain and attract that 10% of the market, companies need to make sure that their web sites work with Firefox, which most companies seem to think is worth doing.
The Mozilla Foundation’s charter states that it exists “to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet”. To this effect, a Firefox browser monopoly isn’t favoured over and IE monopoly. But having enough market share to be able to start pulling their weight around the internet for the purpose of promoting standards, and compatibility is a great thing.
Mozila’s influence led to improvements to Internet Explorer as well – think of tabbed browsing and RSS feed tracking – and it’s shipping earlier than planned as well. Mike said that even though those aren’t Mozilla products, the Mozilla project did contribute to improving the user experience of those people using Internet Explorer by coercing IE to adopt some of its superior features.
