The Makers of Firefox Talk About Software Design

To be more exact, while John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, aren’t entirely responsible for Firefox, they have been disproportionately influential.

Lilly, a Stanford graduate, set out on a course that seemed destined to one day result in software stardom. As a result of that journey came Firefox. Of course, along the road, a company was forged. Years later, Mozilla has grown as a business, constantly improving their product positioning and trying to etch out a competitive advantage.

While the competition seems to be in the lead as far as Firefox is concerned, their approach to design has been a unique one. Their products, too, have sprung from this novel form of thinking. The folks at Mozilla are more concerned with improving how the software interacts with the person, as opposed to how the person interacts with the software.

The process has been colloquially described as the reverse of artificial intelligence. Rather, it’s the intelligence a computer can gather about a person that drives Firefox and its makers. For more on their design approach, watch the video featuring Lilly and Schroepfer.