Head of Mozilla Europe on Firefox 3 (and some other juicy stuff like Silverlight)

Groklaw has an interesting interview with the head of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot, that might be of interest to people on the forums.

Some tidbits:

About new features in Firefox:

Now, just to name a few highly visible ones: Speed. There is a lot of increase in speed. A lot of increase, a lot of improvement in terms of memory management -- and these are two things that, you know, our users have been asking for. And in terms of user interface, there are improvements related to the extension manager. There's a new download manager.

And maybe the most visible thing that really gets people excited and that keeps them running Firefox 3 beta instead of trying it and returning to a stable product is what we call "The Awesome Bar," which is kind of a joke for a name, but it's the address bar that's much smarter than before that enables you to retrieve places or sites that you've been visiting before.

About Silverlight:

And so, well, it's not the kind of thing I want to see on the web. Although I, once again, this is my personal opinion, but I am sure many people within the Mozilla project have similar opinions, right? We want technologies that are innovative but that can be used by anyone, any browser, on any operating system. And proprietary technologies are just not like this, right?

[...]

Are we going to see a version of Silverlight running on Safari, on Firefox on the Mac? Not so sure. Is it going to run on Linux? Well, maybe, because there is the Mono project. But maybe Mono is going to be sued, or maybe the users that use Mono on a non-Novell distribution which is not covered by patents are going to get, you know, endangered. Or maybe they're just going to be threatened by this.

My opinion: don't touch Silverlight, it's a serious tool to get people locked-in to Windows.

There's also some great stuff in the article on how Mozilla funds other Free software projects, like SQLite, and how they use those projects in Firefox. I like the modularity and how they're re-using other people's code and contributing back to those upstream codebases. The theory of FLOSS is cool, but it's great to see it actually working.