Mozilla CEO John Lilly argues that Firefox is the platform for the Web. He may just have a point.
John argues that the Firefox platform is actually more robust and easier to use than "rival" platforms like Facebook, iPhone, etc. Unlike these others, Firefox is a true community platform, reflecting the tastes, requirements, and whims of a broad array of users. It plays host to a wide array of third-party plug-ins.
But the community angle doesn't end with plug-ins. 40 percent of the Firefox code wasn't written by Mozilla. This has stayed constant as Mozilla has grown. This is exceptionally impressive when you consider that Firefox is 6 million lines of code.
This community input is demonstrated by the last launch of Firefox. It came out of the gate localized into 37 languages. Mozilla wrote one of those, the English language version. By comparison, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 launched only in English, despite having far more internal resources.