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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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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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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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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Sometimes in life, you find an opportunity to make a difference in something you care about, and it feels like, even though you didn’t know it at the time, that the last few years have really just been practice, giving you the background, skills and ability to really help. And in a very few circumstances–once or twice in a lifetime if you’re lucky–the opportunity you get to make a difference is one that has a very large, even global impact. My new role as CEO of Mozilla Corporation feels like one of those times.

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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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Mozilla is expanding its browser platform into new realms, creating APIs and a portable storehouse for bookmarks, customizations, passwords, histories, preferences and other metadata.

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