Mozilla基金会主席Mitchell Baker在谋智网络（Mozilla Online）办公室

Mozilla“选择”之路促使Firefox成为全球4亿网民首选浏览器

Mozilla基金会主席Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士表示，早在Mozilla推出Firefox浏览器之际，此前只有一款浏览器，用户无可选择。而给用户以“选择”，必将会 为互联网带来更多的创新和更好的发展。于是，Mozilla选择了这条“选择”之路，推出Firefox火狐浏览器。如今Firefox已在全球占据 31.5%的市场份额，在印尼等地的市场份额已高达70%，充分证明了Firefox火狐浏览器是互联网用户喜爱的一个“选择”，并且这个“选择”改变了 人们的互联网生活。

继Mozilla成功推出Firefox火狐浏览器之后，很多企业也推出了其他的浏览器。一直活跃在市场中的除了Mozilla的 Firefox火狐浏览器，还有微软IE浏览器，Apple在它的操作系统出推出了自己的浏览器，Google为了发展自己的业务也推出了自己的浏览器， 还有同样有着很长历史的Opera浏览器。此外在中国，还有很多以IE浏览器为内核的浏览器。无论是在中国的市场，还是在全球的舞台，浏览器的竞争都非常 激烈。这恰恰证明了Mozilla的成功，因为整个世界认同了Mozilla，也认同了Mozilla提出的“选择”的做法。Mozilla有很多使 命，Firefox火狐浏览器就是为了大家能在上网的时候更安全、更惬意、更个性化，并定制自己需要的功能。不断创新、为用户提供多种选择的使命，促使 Mozilla一直在努力，去为用户带来更好的产品。

Firefox，最值得用户信赖的浏览器

如今我们提到浏览器，会想到它的一些特点，比如我是不是喜欢浏览器的标签设置、是不是喜欢它的设计和布局，而最为一名普通网民，最让用户关注的是：我应该信任哪个浏览器–因为浏览器是我们通往互联网世界的大门。

Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士说，用户之所以选择Firefox火狐浏览器，原因有很多。除了快速、简单、好用、可定制等多种功能外，用户一直以来所需 要的，正是对产品和企业的信任。人们之所以使用Firefox火狐浏览器，是因为人们信任火狐，因为Mozilla是非盈利性的组织。Mozilla推广 Firefox火狐浏览器，不是为了盈利，而是以用户的需求为中心。建立一个开放的互联网，是可以被信任的，是以用户使用作为出发点的。这正是 Mozilla推出火狐的原因–把我们的梦想变为现实，让互联网更安全、更被人们所信任。

Firefox，以用户为中心的浏览器

Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士还表示，互联网每天都在发生着变化，每过几个月都会有新的东西出现。无论在中国，还是在全球，现在都成为了“移动互联 网”。手机、互联网已经融为了一个新的主体。我们在手机上的操作，通过不同的终端设备，也可以在电视和电脑上实现。更快速、更安全、更好用、更灵活、更开 放，以用户为中心仍是重点。Mozilla致力于把用户放在核心的位置，我们现在为用户提供产品，用户也可以自己设计产品，我们让用户觉得这就是“我的生 活，我的产品”。

在中国市场，Firefox火狐浏览器推出了专为中国网民量身定制的火狐中国版（Firefox China Edition），携手QQ、新浪、百度、优酷、豆瓣、人人网等中国网民喜爱的应用，针对中国网民的使用习惯进行本地化开发。比如火狐中国版中专有的“一 键分享”功能，可以将网页上的内容一键发布到QQ空间、新浪微博、人人分享等。而火狐中文官方社区（http://17huohu.cn/）的建立，进一步促进了Firefox的本地化，也为中国的火狐爱好者提供了一个更好的分享和交流平台。

浏览器将成为未来互联网的整合平台

谈到对未来互联网和浏览器的发展，Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士表示，在未来的几个月里，我们会看到浏览器在继续发展并发生巨大的变化。现在，我们认为浏览器是放在我们的电脑中的，可以 前进后退浏览网页。但是，随着互联网的飞速发展，浏览器会发展成为一种便携的软件。因为，浏览器以后将会时刻出现在生活中，在移动设备上、电脑上、在电视 上。也许“浏览器”这个词会过时了，也许我们可能还会继续使用“浏览器”这个词，但它已经不能涵盖所有的意思。因此，Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士表示，未来应该有一个整合的平台，让我们能在上面完成所有的事情，这就是未来的浏览器。

Mozilla基金会主席寄语火狐中国社区

Firefox火狐浏览器是一款免费的、开源的浏览器，也是每一个人的浏览器，因为它反映了所有参与创造它的人们的需求。Mozilla是一个 开源的项目，来自于很多志愿者的贡献。你可以使用它，信任它，并且可以让它变得更好、更适合你。因为开源软件的透明性会让你了解到互联网到底是什么，并且 了解到它是如何成长的。

Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士在此次到访北京之际，希望越来越多的中国朋友知道Firefox火狐浏览器，尝试使用火狐，体验火狐优越的性能。她还希望 有更多的人加入到火狐社区，去学习浏览器是如何开发的，去尝试创造和优化浏览器。Mitchell Baker（米切尔.贝克）女士特意感谢在中国所有参与开源事业的朋友、Firefox的用户们、Mozilla社-区志愿者以及所有支持和关心 Mozilla Firefox的朋友们，感谢大家使用Firefox火狐浏览器！

米切尔贝克为Mozilla公司董事长，曾担任公司CEO。今年五月，Mozilla CEO约翰·李利(John Lilly)辞任CEO一职后，米切尔贝克重新掌管Mozilla。

米切尔贝克回忆称，在Mozill推出Firefox浏览器的时候，之前只有一款浏览器。Firefox证明了用户是可以实现多个选择的。在Firefox推出之后，又有很多企业推出了其他的浏览器。

米切尔贝克表示，在中国市场的竞争对手比其他地区更要多。尽管竞争可能会让我们不安逸，但是欢迎竞争对手的出现。

米切尔贝克称，希望越来越多的中国朋友能知道Firefox火狐浏览器，尝试使用火狐体验火狐。她表示，Mozilla是非盈利性的组织，我们做这些不是为了盈利，而是以用户的需求为中心。

据最新的市场调查数据显示，九月全球浏览器市场中，IE市场份额重新跌至60%以下，为59.65%，firefox为22.96%位居第二，随后为谷歌Chrome，苹果Safari。

观看视频：http://tech.163.com/10/1013/08/6IS30LMS000915BF.html

（2010年7月Mozilla Summit全家福）

观看视频演示：http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTkwMTcyNDg0.html

Under the terms of its anti-trust settlement with the European Commission, Microsoft will no longer be able to restrict choice toWindows users across the EU, as well as Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway. Instead, it must help them make a choice: yes, they might retain Internet Explorer as their gateway to the web – but they will also be offered the options of Safari, Chrome, Firefox,Opera,AOL, Maxthon, K-Meleon, Flock,Avant Browser, Sleipnir and Slim Browser.

The screen – as well as a web page at browserchoice.eu hosted by Microsoft –is designed to display, in random order,
the icons of the five leading browsers by market share: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google’s Chrome. The logos appear alongside some brief text about each; scroll accross and you will see less prominent mentions of the next seven browsers ranked by popularity. Click one or more of the buttons marked “Install” and you will have participatedinanexercise indemocratic accountability as potentially transformative to the web economyas any general-election ballot. That’s because the “browser ballot”, as it’s being called, could determine not only who controls our access to the world widewebin the future – but also the shape of the web itself. As Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and a long-time observer of the web, sees it, “We’re coming to a fork in the road where we’re being asked to choose between a web that is largely open and standards-based and one that is essentially run by companies.”

For years browsers have been the Cinderellas of the computing world, largely unnoticed conduits to the web. Most users stick with the one that comes with their computer (Explorer with Windows; Safari on the Mac); plenty are unaware there are even alternatives.

But since 2003, one browser has emerged from nowhere to challenge the dominance of the corporate giants. Built and
updated not by a multinational company but by an alliance of 250 staff and about 10,000 volunteers, and backed by a charitable foundation, the browser is free to download and its source code is open for anyone to inspect and modify –
all of which has made it the world’s second most popular browser, used by some 330 million people. And it has achieved that almost entirely through word of mouth.

The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, an elegant, feature-laden, customisable and, crucially, non-corporate browser that runs onWindows, OS X and Linux, has a global market share of 24 per cent, according to web analytics company NetApplications. That puts it behind Explorer at 62 per cent, but ahead of both Safari and Chrome, each of which hovers around five per cent. Across Europe, Firefox’s penetration is even higher, at 32 per cent, and in Slovenia, Macedonia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Ghana, Indonesia and the Philippines it is the number-one choice, with more than 50 per cent market penetration.

In the past year, Firefox’s popularity has risen even further. In July 2008, Mozilla earned a place in the Guinness World Records for the most downloads in 24 hours (8,002,530 of Firefox 3.0); in the two weeks following the launch of Firefox 3.6 in January this year, the upgrade was downloaded more than 40 million times. Andeven though its entire approach is the antithesis to that of the VC-backedWest Coast corporates, Firefox earns Mozilla real money. In 2008, according to its most recent audited accounts, Mozilla – which, remember, gives away its main product –announced a record income of $78.6 million. This comes mostly from fees paid by Google,Yahoo,Amazon and eBay to feature in the search box on Firefox’s toolbar, and a share of revenue generated by users clicking Google ads via Firefox-initiated searching.

All this would have been almost unimaginable by the small team of developers who began the Firefox project nearly 12 years ago as an attempt to rescue something from the ashes of Netscape Navigator, a browser that went from web domination to near death in just a few years. Navigator was developed by a 22-year-old software developer called Marc Andreesen in 1994.With it, Andreesen’s company, Netscape, had stumbled across a product perfectly designed to ride the world wide web’snewmass popularity, givingmany users their first taste of hyperlinks, web pages and the almost unimaginable scale of the information starting to be available online.

Navigator was distributed free for personal use, but sold to businesses via download and retail outlets. In addition Netscape got healthy revenues from its web-server software NetSite. By 1995, its income was doubling every quarter. On August 9 1995, the day the company was floated on the stockmarket – to many, the official start of the first dotcom boom– its share price rose from $28 to $75, valuing the company at about $2 billion. By December 1995, shares had reached $174.
Yet as fast as it had risen, Netscape fell.Within six years its market share had dropped from more than 85 per cent to
less than ten – and that residue was only due to users not bothering to upgrade. The reason? A simple change of business strategy taken by one Bill Gates, 1,300km north of Netscape’s SiliconValley campus, at Microsoft HQ in Seattle.

At the start of 1995, Microsoft appeared to have little interest in the internet with, reportedly, only four people working fulltime on developing a browser. Its ambitionswere focused squarelyonconquering the desktop throughWindows and associated programs such asWord. But by May, Gates was telling executives that the web
was where the company’s future lay. That December, four months after the Netscape flotation, the company released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer, a browser that, crucially, came free withWindows 95.

Explorer was a disaster for Netscape. Microsoft put huge resources behind its development, launching four fullnewversions in asmanyyears, bundling Explorer with every new copy of Windows and investing $150 million in Apple (effectively saving the company) in return for its making Explorer the default browser on the Mac operating system.

By January 1998, Netscape was finding it increasingly hard to compete and in a last-ditch attempted fight-back it
published theNavigator source code online in the hope that the emerging open-sourcecommunity would take the program – along with some associated products for handling email and IRC chat – and build something new. The company retained the rights to make commercial use of any code developed by outsiders.
The project was managed by a loose group of mostly former Netscape employees, brought together as the Mozilla organisation, named after Netscape’s dinosaur mascot. It initially had some breakthroughs in developingwhatwastobecometheMozilla Application Suite, but in 2003 the group decided to start again and build a new browser from scratch. It would take another three years to see a public release, but Firefox had been born.

It’s a Friday night in one of the tiny mediaeval alleys off Brussels’ Grand Place, and the three floors of the Deleriumbar are packed with revellers knocking back beers and shooting the breeze. The music is loud and the atmosphere somewhere between a festival and an indie music club. Yet the topics of conversation are more about GNU and bug-fixing than The White Stripes. The T-shirts feature obscure puns from the world of programming and many of the
friends catching up tonight have only ever met before online.

This is Fosdem (Free and Open Source Sofware Developer’s European Meeting), Europe’s biggest and grungiest opensource software conference. Anyone can come and there’s no registration, no name badges and no branded merchandise for the 5,000 delegates – and no one is really in charge. Instead, if you have something to contribute in the fight to preserve what the open-source community sees as the web’s essential freedom, you’re welcome.

There’s a sense of celebrationamongthe crowd– and not just overMozilla’s recordbreaking year. The increased popularity of web applications means that smaller, non-corporate players now have a real chance of taking on the big software companies at their own game. Predominantly young, male, articulate and impassioned, the Fosdem delegates are talking excitedly about “changing the world”, “making connections” and “keeping the mission moving on”. It could be an evangelical convention – although no one is wearing a tie.

The browser ballot is causing considerable excitement, with Mozilla seeing it as a long-awaited opportunity to introduce ordinary computer users to the idea that they have a choice about the sort of internet they interact with.Yettworecent developments are casting an uneasy shadow: Apple’s success with its closed approach to the iPhone and iPad – the latter announced a week earlier – and Google’s launch of Chrome, seen as a real competitor to Firefox that, some here are muttering, could kill theMozilla dream.

Apple tends to get short shrift at events like these. “You know why I am here?” says one delegate,waving an iPhone. “This! This is a machine to deliver money to the iTunes Store. The fact that I can buy andownsomething but not alter it or write software for it is just beyond the pale.”

Google tends to draw more nuanced responses. “Google is tricky,” says Matjaž Horvat, a developer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, who helped translate Firefox into Slovenian in his spare time. “Sure, Chrome is opensource, which is good PR for the company, though I don’t personally think it is a very good browser. But then it takes you through to products such as Google Docs that are not open-source. So you have to ask, with Chrome, who really controls the web?”

This anxiety about Chrome pervades discussions at Fosdem. Google is reported to be spending $100 million advertising its browser, its first significant consumer ad campaign (Google would not comment on the budget). It has nearly 20,000 staff rather than 10,000 volunteers and its skilful aggregation of online users’ data makes it a formidable competitor.

“Google has a huge advantage over everyone else,” says Mark Surman, the Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, “because it is carrying out a real-time census of humanity. And there is a risk of it gaining a monopoly of insight that raises the lowbarriers to entry that the internet has created.”

Until mid-2008, Google was Mozilla’s mentor and champion, funding it through its support of Firefox. The two companies even had neighbouring offices in Mountain View, California, and Mozilla staff were able to use the
Googleplex canteen. Google’s funding of the foundation is guaranteed at least to the end of August 2011, and Mozilla has almost $100 million in the bank and plenty of search engines interested in that spot on the Firefox toolbar. But with its aggressive promotion of Chrome,Google has positioned itself right in the middle ofMozilla’s territory.

“I expect Chrome to gain market share of course,” says Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation and a former lawyer who has been part of the Mozilla project fromthe start after joining fromNetscape’s legal team. “[Google has] lots ofmoney, lots of smart people, some very popular web applications, loads of determination and loads of data.With all of that behind them they damn right ought to put something useful out there. And it’s going to make us up our game, too.”

Baker stands out at events like Fosdem. Bubbly, engaging, hugely intelligent and incisive, and sporting what at best could be called an idiosyncratic hairstyle, she is also, at 57, decades older than most of the delegates. Having grown up in Oakland in the 70s, she read Asian Studies and then law at Berkeley, including spending a year in Beijing, where she developed conversational Mandarin, which she still keeps up. She was one of the first people to be recruited to Netscape’s legal team in 1994, and helped design the licence under which Netscape released theNavigator code. In 2003, when AOL, which had bought Netscape, closed down the latter’s browser division, she became president and later chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. Two years later she was made CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the foundation, which co-ordinates the development of Mozilla’s internet products. She stood down from that role in 2008, to concentrate on running theMozillaFoundation itself, which is now primarily concerned with Mozilla’s policies and advocacy work. In her spare time, she trains as a trapeze artist.

Baker is a long-time advocate of open-source principles and is evangelical about her beliefs. At an early Fosdem session, she echoed open-source activist Richard Stallman and urged a packed seminar room to beware of a future for the internet that is “free as in beer but not free as in speech”.

“Even if everyone has free and open-source software, our project hasn’t finished,” she said, striding up and down the stage and clicking through OpenOffice presentation slides. “We need to concern ourselves withwho is collecting information about us and what can we do about that. Can I access it? Can I control it? If not, we still won’t be truly free.”

If this sounds demagogic, it is because Baker has understood that Mozilla’s strength lies in the number of people who go
along with its “project”. If you add to the 10,000 or so volunteers who actively write code for Firefox the people who test early versions before they are given a public release, you end up with a group of perhaps more than a million.These are impassioned evangelists who believe that the best future for the internet does not involve proprietary software, but instead uses programs and tools that can be pulled apart and reassembled by anyonewhounderstands coding. They believe this enough to give their time and energy for free in order to advance the cause. Baker would like more of them. “If I am going to make a choice about changing my online life,” she tells the Fosdemcrowd, “20, 30,40million people are going to have to make the same decision. This year we have to spread
our values to consumers.”

Baker has acknowledged that the launch of Chrome was “uncomfortable” for Mozilla. She is quick to point out that Mozilla and Google share a common goal: to unseat the closed, proprietary Internet Explorer from its dominant position. But Mozilla has sometimes been very public in its attacks on Google. In December, after the latter’s Eric Schmidt claimed: “If you have something that you don’twantanyonetoknow,maybe youshouldn’tbedoingitinthefirst
place,” Asa Dotzler, the Mozilla Corporation’scommunityco-ordinator for Firefox marketing projects, posted his response on his official blog. Dotzler quoted Schmidt with a link to the video where he had made his comments
and showed his readers “how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)” The result was a lively discussion about both Google and Bing’s privacy policies – with neither search engine coming out particularly well. (Google points out that Schmidt was very specifically referring to the requirements of theUS Patriot Act.)

Privacy is a hot issue for Mozilla. It has announced plans to produce a series of icons that could be used on the web to alert users how any data they give up will be used. And grassroots open-sourcers such as Horvat are also unsure about Google’s deep-down commitment to open-source: “When you have someone like Google controlling access to thewebvia itsownbrowser so it can protect and promote something like Google Docs, you are in danger of creating a lot of monopoliesontheweb. That will crush innovation. The world is a better place when people can connect with and modify what they use.”

For Google, this misrepresents Chrome. “It’s very strange to suggest that Chromeis controlling people’s browsing or promoting Google Docs,” says Peter Barron, the company’s director of communications for northern and central Europe. “The briefest look at Chrome would show it’s utterly untrue. A major aim of Chrome is to make browsers better at running all kinds ofweb apps, not just Google products.”

At the Googleplex itself, though, there’s a certain empathy for the open-source activists. “There’s a problem, of course, as wegetsomuchbigger,” says ChrisDiBona, Google’s open-source-programs manager. “People don’t necessarily trust us so much straight out of the gate, or even like us. The fact that Chrome is open-source can challenge that point of view, but in the end some people want to see everything online open-source. That’s just a bit disingenuous.With Google Docs, for example, so much of that code is based on Google-specific architecture that to release it as open-source would just take too much engineering time. And anyway, we have released a lot of it, especially the UI [user interface] libraries and elements like that.”

Nor, the company insists, is itnowout to take on its old friend Mozilla. “We are not in competition,” insists Brian Rakowski, product development manager and to many the brains behind Chrome. “We are playing in the same space: we’re really excited about what Firefox has achieved in the past ten years. It has singlehandedly changed the market. But there came a point when we had to take on the browser project ourselves.”

Why this happened is up for up for debate, but both DiBona and Rakowski stress difficulties the Firefox team had implementing certain changes to the browser’s JavaScript engine, which, DeBona says, was running too slowly: “We had to make the decision to stop building more and more on top of Firefox and start again with a new core architecture.”

In fact , Chrome’s launch may have started a new symbiosis between Moz i l l a and Google. Building on the work of
Chrome’s developers, Mozilla has already reincorporated Chrome’s better handling of JavaScript back into Firefox.

“The added competition caused by Chrome means that everyone rises,” says Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “Our job is to ensure that people have a choice, which iswhythe ballot is so important.” And, he adds,
rumours that Google and Mozillahavesomehowfallen out are untrue. “I have lunch with people from Google regularly and there’s a lot of friendliness.”

In fact, Mozilla may not need to be as worried about Chrome as, say, Microsoft. Later this year Google will launch Chrome OS, a pareddown, Linux-based operating system that will run on low-power netbook computers. Under Chrome OS the only application that runs on the desktop is a browser (Chrome, naturally) – all other computing
is done in the cloud. The result is cheaper and simpler hardware, very fast boot-up times (possibly as little as four seconds from switchon to surfing the web), a big jump in battery life and, Google hopes, more people using Gmail and
Google Docs. And whereas Chrome OS is not (yet) an alternative to Windows or Apple’s OS X – it will run only on specially designed hardware, for example – by giving near instant internet access, it is only really limited by what web
applications are available.
“In effect, you will only have one program running,” says Rakowski, who expects Chrome OS to launch in the second half of this year. “You will get a fast boot-up. Security is better as you won’t be able to install malware. And if there is a system problem, you can just reinstall the whole thing over the web.”

If that sounds a little familiar, it’s because Google will offer a trade-off similar to the one that has made the iPhone such a success: comfort over hackability. It’s a trade-off that worries the likes of Horvat and Baker. And whereas Baker is happy to acknowledge Apple’s achievements, Mozilla, she says, stands for something very different.

“People who follow Apple have avery strong connection with it,anaffection ifyoulike, just as people have a connection withMozilla. But its focus is on a product that is integrated, predetermined and highly controlled and we have different values. Real innovation comes fromopenness.We need to think about what it means to live online and who controls that experience. It’s a choice and we need to get people to understand that it’s a choice they can make.”

One field where this choice is being hotly debatedisvideo-compressiontechnology.Currently, rawvideo files are too large to distribute usefully across the internet, so a whole industry of video codecs has emerged to squeeze them as much as possible without a perceptible drop in quality. Many of these are used widely on the internet, but the only time ordinary users become aware of their existence is when their browser is unable toshowa particular video.

Now video-compression codecs have found themselves a hot topic in discussions about the next revision of HTML, the web’s mark-up language. The latest version, HTML5, due to be completed in 2012, will reduce web browsers’ dependence in showing video on third-party applications such as Adobe’s Flash.

Flash is currently the de facto video standard on the web – if you have watched a video online, you have almost ertainly used it – and some web developers are uncomfortable that a single company should have so much control over one of the internet’s key media. It’s unlikely that Adobe will pull the plug on Flash and stop us watchingYouTube, but among open-source activists there is a sense that Flash’s dominance is bad for the “free” internet, especially if you are a video maker as well as a video viewer.

The HTML5 developers are seeking to address those concerns by including in the code a new language for video that doesn’t require the use of Flash or any other third-party add-on. Instead, an HTML5-compatible browser will be able to decode video directly from the web page’s source code. (YouTube is currently trialling an HTML5 feed at youtube.com/html5.) Yet, perhaps rather inevitably, talks have stalled over which video-compression codec HTML5 should champion.
In opposite corners are two technologies: H.264 and Ogg Theora. H.264 is already widely used both on the web and elsewhere. It is stable and effective and, though commercially patented, will be royalty-free to internet users at least until 2015. (Most of the H.264 paten tholders’ income comes from licensing the codec to technologies such as Blu-rayand the cable-television industry.) Ogg Theora – named after the Max Headroom character Theora Jones – is open-source, slightly less efficient but effectively patent free.

Apple, among others, is arguing for H.264 on the grounds of stability. Mozilla is supporting Theora because of its openness and the foundation’s Chris Blizzard is warning of “GIF-like surprises”, referring to the moment in 1999 when
Unisys decided to start charging for the use of GIF imaging technology, for which it owned the patent. GIFs were by then used widely across the net and Unisys was proposing to charge site owners up to $5,000 for the use of its technology. The result was the demise of GIF and a lot of reformatting of existing images.

“It’s scary to think of a world where you would have to fork up $5,000 just to be able to use images on a website,”Blizzard wrote on his blog in January. “Think about all of the opportunity, the weblogs, the search engines (even Google!) and all the other simple ideas that became major services that would never have been started because of ahuge tax being put on [the ability] to use a fundamental web technology. It makes the web as a democratic technology distinctly undemocratic.”

Codecs and GIF patents may seem of little interest to the ordinary internet user, but Mozilla is hoping to persuade the rest of us otherwise.

“Software has a very large influence over what you do and how you think,” says Tristan Nitot, president ofMozilla Europe.“We needtomake sure that the software we use is serving us and not serving someone else’s interest. This
is the year that we are going to have to persuade consumers to think about the sort of the web they want. Otherwise
they may end up with one that is a lot less free and,whoknows, by then it may be too late.”

David Baker is managing editor of wired. He wrote about TCHO chocolate in issue 02.10

1998年3月31日是Mozilla正式成立的日子。 这一天Mozilla的代码第一次以开源软件协议发布给公众，而Mozilla的项目也开始由Mozilla组织进行管理。Mozilla将会在2008年全年中庆祝这第十年。