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.

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Just six years ago, the web was dominated by one browser: Internet Explorer, specifically Internet Explorer 6. Without Netscape to compete against it and the ability to bundle its browser with Windows XP, Microsoft (MSFT) experienced superior market share–up to 95 percent at the peak. Today though, we have far superior browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer 8.

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For much of this decade, Mozilla and its Firefox browser were the upstarts, out to beat the big, bad Microsoft (MSFT) and its Internet Explorer browser. Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, the browser that helped jump-start the web revolution, was nimble and it was secure–something Microsoft’s IE wasn’t.

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The Internet is atwitter with Google Chrome’s innovative new features, but there was no clear winner in our speed test comparing Firefox and Chrome–which means your choice of browser may depend solely on features. Apart from a few specific issues (namely process management), many of Chrome’s best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let’s take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome’s best features to Firefox.

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Google’s release Tuesday of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet “cloud.” I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a time. That was, for us Mac users, anyway, a very big deal. Chrome–if we can trust the comic book–promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously.

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Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? … “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. “When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, ‘We should build our own browser,’” Schmidt says. “And I said no.”

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To unleash the wild creativity of the Internet on mobile phones, we have to open them up to the real Internet, says Mitchell Baker, the second speaker of the morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

The chairman (er, chairwoman) of Mozilla says it shouldn’t matter what device you use to access the Web.

Mozilla is the nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser, which is being used by hundreds of millions of people as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

She says that mobile browsers should all just work. The use cases do argue for different devices, but you will always want things quickly and with few keystrokes. “The information is the same,” she said. “We should be able to access it, mix it up, mash it up, save it, store it. All of those things should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train.”

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Mozilla Corp.’s COO John Lilly has been promoted to CEO. He is taking over from Mitchell Baker, who will remain chairman.

Mozilla Corp. is the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which manages the open-source Internet browser Firefox and email client Thunderbird. Last week, we predicted that Mozilla Corp. would eventually go public, and we estimated that the company would be worth between $1.5 billion and $4 billion as a publicly traded entity.

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How much is the entity that manages the Microsoft IE-killing browser Firefox worth, and when will it go public? Answers: 1) A lot; and 2) Probably this year or next.

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