Ask Jeeves Meets with Mozilla Firefox
Google is not the only search company which is cuddling up to Mozilla’s Firefox (albeit the only one which is outright hiring its developers), Ask Jeeves has put its foot into the Firefox door by offering to work with firefox to develop ways to for the popular web browser’s users to experience the Ask Jeeves search technology and new features. Tuoc Luong, Ask Jeeves’ EVP Technology, writes about his encounters and future plans with Firefox on the Ask Jeeves blog.
Here are some excerpts of Tuoc’s blog entry, enjoy:
I walked into the mozilla office and immediately recognized Chris Hoffman (one of their lead personnel) from my days at Borland. I asked about the recent hire of Ben G. (one of Firefox lead developer) by Google. They didn’t seem to be upset or too concerned. They said that they have other people who work elsewhere but contributed significantly to mozilla.org. This indicates that they expect Ben to continue contributing and not bring Google’s bias into the equation any more than other company sponsored Mozilla contributors.
We went on to discuss three subjects: 1) AJ Desktop Search 2) AJ Leveraging Firefox Browser 3) XUL platform.
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search –
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.
Ask Jeeves and the Firefox Browser –
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.
Read the full story about Ask Jeeves and FireFox at the Ask Jeeves Blog
