When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent.

John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, has said Mozilla is not worried about the announcement of Google's Chrome web browser. In an interview with Om Malik, Lilly said "They feel that they can make a better browser by starting from scratch–advances in browsers are good."

The current issue (16.08) of Wired Magazine has a brief interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June.

According to John Lilly, the Firefox web browser has 126 million unique monthly users. A figure extrapolated from an Active Daily Users number of 48 million, itself a massive increase on the 23 million ADU figure from this time last year. So who is John Lilly and why should we take any notice of his figures?

John Lilly wants it both ways. Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

Firefox for Mobile (codenamed Fennec) is the name of the build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser for smaller non-PC devices, mobile phones and PDAs. Firefox for mobile 1.0 uses the same version of the Gecko layout engine as Firefox 3.6.

John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, told technology blogger Om Malik that they will release an application for the iPhone a few weeks from now and that it will be "really exciting". No further details have been said yet so we are left guessing.It could be similar to Fennec, a mobile version of Firefox web browser that is designed for smaller devices...

John Lilly, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, has estimated that Firefox, the company’s popular open source web browser, is used by at least 126 million people around the world.

Apple's launch of Safari on Windows has already managed to irk a competitor. However, Mozilla's John Lilly isn't upset that there's a new browser in town; what bugs him is how that new browser was introduced. One of the pie charts Steve Jobs used to illustrate browser market share showed only Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Safari, with no mention of Firefox or any other browser.