Firefox

Tuoc Luong, EVP Technology at Ask Jeeves, recently met with the Mozilla folks to discuss collaboration and open source search technology. Here's his blog entry about the meeting.

We went on to discuss three subjects: 1) AJ Desktop Search 2) AJ Leveraging Firefox Browser 3) XUL platform.

We discussed Ask Jeeves desktop search and the notion of open-sourcing it. We're open at two levels. Contributing just the core desktop indexing technology or possibly the entire desktop search application. They discussed how/what they would evaluate before accepting a major piece of code/product contribution: code size, internationalization, etc. Whether or not we partner with Mozilla on this effort, Chris and team thought it was a good idea for us to pursue overall.

We shared AJ view and support for open source standard, especially on the desktop, and their efforts on Firefox and Thunderbird, both of which I'm impressed with. I shared that Mozilla browser didn't do it for me but Firefox certainly converted many of AJ engineering (including myself) over exclusively to Firefox. We explained that we want to support and leverage Firefox by building extensions to and plug-ins within Firefox. We discussed the fact that it doesn't make sense for us to build a browser from scratch, but we think building Ask specific functionalities on top of Firefox to build an AJ-branded or co-branded browser could make sense in 2005.

Mozilla guys then talked abou XUL and how Firefox and Thunderbird were built using XUL. I was very impressed with the UI capabilities. I mentioned that we have a piece of technology called Octopus that may be very good to integrate into XUL platform. Rafael remembered Octopus because Mark Andreessen was an investor and on Octopus's board. It's ideal as a layer on top of the browser. I thought this could be an interesting extension or integrated into XUL. I said I would demo Octopus to them at some point.