Somehow I’ve spent most of the past seven years working with the platform. I touched on it at Eazel where we used Gecko to display HTML, but mostly left the hard work of integrating a barely-ready gtkmozembed to Mike and Ramiro

Then at Danger I ended up as the main engineer working on our licensed fork of the ProxiWeb web proxy (love those innovative names) which used Mozilla (circa M6 or M8 I think) on Solaris x86 to format web pages for display on hiptops and Sidekicks. Later we built our own web proxy based on Mozilla 1.3, following a similar model but with all the lessons we learned maintaining the old code for years.

Eventually I ran away with the circus as one of the first employees at Flock where we were trying to re-imagine the desktop browser experience, based on Firefox. After a couple of years struggling with vision and execution they worked it out – soon after I left. Now it’s showing the potential of moving beyond the dominant Mosaic-with-tabs user experience that the main players are following.

Now I’m at Songbird, building another kind of browser – one whose focus is integrating media consumption and management. We’re building on XULRunner, the application platform that has been spun out from the Mozilla applications. It’s not my favorite platform for building applications, but how else are you going to build a cross-platform web browser.

Somehow this passing interest I had ten years ago has turned into a career.

This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share on Windows is but it seems to be significant. If all those users suddenly have Safari installed that could potentially cause a big shake-up in browser market share.

On Friday there was a minor shitstorm on planet.mozilla.org about Apple pushing down Safari to all Windows iTunes and Quicktime users.

If only we had a reusable system-wide XULRunner it would be really easy to do similar but less evil promotion of our growing XUL-based free software suite. Songbird could suggest to users that they might like Firefox – and it would take just a single click and a tiny XPI download to have users running Firefox. We could even get intelligent and suggest Thunderbird to heavy email users or Flock to heavy social networking users.

iTunes’ US market share is around 27% (according to the best numbers I can find). If Apple flips the switch and makes Safari the default browser for all those users Firefox will start looking irrelevant fast.