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This is the transcript of the chat with Asa Dotzler, 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.

(David Tenser: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Mozilla!)

I’ve had many roles at Mozilla over the last decade or so. I started as a volunteer trying to figure out how to get involved as a non-coder (not even a very technical person). After banging my head against the wall for a while, I found a couple of people that were hosting developer builds on their FTP servers (back then, Mozilla didn’t make binaries), so I started testing and reporting bugs.

I learned a lot from the developers about what they needed from bug reporters before they got overwhelmed by so many testers, so I became sort of a buffer -a teacher for newbies to help them adjust to bugzilla before interfacing with the developers directly that led to my role as Mozilla Community QA guy and a job with Netscape(/AOL) in 2000.

Then I moved into project management with Drivers@Mozilla and from there into Firefox project management. Then the Mozilla Foundation, and now I’m doing evangelism.

What do you think are the key things to keeping community members motivated? I know that’s a hard question, given that motivations vary.

Absolutely, motivations vary. That’s why it’s important to develop personal relationships. As you get to know people, you learn what drives them and you can help them find the right spot in Mozilla to have the most impact in an area that matters to them the most. For some that’s solving technical problems; for others, it’s helping users; for me, it was building communities, and I was fortunate enough to have a few wonderful people encouraging me on that: Mitchell Baker, Seth Spitzer, and a couple of others were really important early personal relationships.

Do you use Firefox 3 for your day to day browsing? And, what do you like most about it? Is there anything you dislike?

I’ve been using the latest nightly build since Mozilla first started making nightly builds back in 1999. :)
I love Firefox 3. It’s just so easy to get around the web with great features like the Awesomebar and the new bookmarking system. I do dislike a few things but they’re always getting better. We can always be faster and lighter and more streamlined in UI, so I’m never satisfied, but I sure do love Firefox 3.

(David Tenser: Really, Firefox is the kind of browser that is so good you stop thinking about it. Just my added opinion.)

You seem to have been around the project as long as anyone else at Mozilla. How has it changed? For better or for worse.

Yeah. mitchell, brendan, dmose, shaver, a couple others, we’re the old timers. It’s definitely grown in many ways. We’ve grown in full-time contributors so much that I don’t even know the names of everyone working full time any more. We’ve grown the community so large that I can’t list all the teams and efforts any more. It’s huge and that feels a bit strange to me — to not know everyone and have personal contact with everyone.

But our impact is so much greater than it ever was beforeand so I’m happy giving up some of the personal connections to make sure the world has a better Web experience.

Do you get many direct support requests from users? If so, how many, and what do you do with them?

I still get a number of support requests in my inbox every week. Occasionally I get the cellphone call too. I’ve even had people show up at the door here at the Mountain View office asking for support. I try to answer them directly in email with the answer to their problem and then tell them “next time, please see support.mozilla.com”

When they call my cell (less often these days) I ask them to visit the website. (I used to have my cell number public so people could call me for release emergencies, etc. I don’t any more)

How has the user support needs changed for Firefox since 2004?”

At the beginning of 2004, we had Firefox 0.8 and probably about a million users. Most of those million users were pretty web savvy, and so they were comfortable with forums and IRC or just figuring it out themselves. Today we have over 170 million users and most of them are not “geeks” and “early adopters”. So we have two big challenges there:  1) support more people, and 2) support less technical people.

I think SUMO’s doing some awesome work to address those challenges and David, who was there in the early days of Phoenix helping our users back in the day, is doing an awesome job scaling and leveraging to be able to do something that’s never been done before. I mean that. It’s really amazing to watch…

(David Tenser: Thank you!! :))

There’s no other consumer product in the world with 170 million users and a serious support sytem run by volunteers.

What day in past 10 years do you like the most and why? Launch Firefox 1.0? What surprise you most last time?

There have been too many to narrow it down to just one. The day I got invited out to the first Mozilla developer day in 2000 and a month later when I got offered a full-time job were pretty amazing. Mozilla 1.0 shipped on my birthday. That was awesome.

Phoenix 0.1, 0.5 and Firefox 1.0 were all days I’ll never forget. But there are so many more.

(David Tenser: For your previous question, I just want to insert that I blame SUMO’s success on the SUMO team and the amazing community. This could not be possible without all the folks in the community.)

Absolutely right and I blame you for inciting them to such efforts ;-)

Many people love Firefox and would love to get involved with the Mozilla project. What is Mozilla doing to reach out to these people, and what is the best way for people to get involved?”

This is a great question and one I’ve asked myself often going all the way back to the beginning of the Mozilla project. The answer I keep coming back to is that every time we lower the barriers to participation, we strengthen the project. So, finding those hurdles to getting involved with existing areas (code, qa, marketing, support, l10n, etc. etc.) and removing or weakening them, those kinds of structural changes…. along with a very positive attitude and a big smile has been my approach :-)

What do you think is the best way to spread Firefox amongst people that always used Internet Explorer and don’t know how Firefox could be better?

I think there are a lot of ways and that no one way is best for everyone. I like to ask people what’s painful about going online and then figure out how Firefox can help that pain point. Most people find the Web really uncomfortable. They’re not like a lot of us who love it and can deal with its problems. The web is a series of flaming hoops they have to jump through to get something done. So I try to show them how Firefox removes those flaming hoops so they can just go online, get done what they want to get done, and get back to the rest of their lives.

Is your role as Mozilla community liaison limited to Firefox now (as a Mozilla Corporation employee) or extends to Mozilla Messaging? What work is being done for community building for Thunderbird?

My role has never been restricted because of my employer so it’s what I want it to be and what the community needs it to be. For the first few years, I was focused on SeaMonkey. Then I moved my focus to Firefox and a bit to Thunderbird. Lately, it’s been mostly focused on Firefox and the Open Web, but I offer help to anyone who needs it and I’ve certainly been involved with Moz Messaging, Mobile, Labs, SeaMonkey, etc. I go where I’m useful :-)

(David Tenser: So you’re everywhere!)

Heh. Trying not to be too scattered.

(David Tenser: Really interesting session. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this!)

Yeah. It was a blast! Thanks for making this happen David!

(David Tenser: Thanks for joining! It’s been lots of fun :))

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.