Ask Jeeves Considers Firefox Variant

Google is not the only search engine interested in leveraging the recent success of Firefox. Ask Jeeves recently met with members of the Mozilla Foundation to discuss opportunities for working together, which could include a version of Firefox tailored for Ask Jeeves, according to executive vice president Tuoc Luong.

Mozilla's release of the open source Firefox has opened the door for companies who want to offer a Web browser, but lack the development resources to start from scratch. AOL recently revived the Netscape brand with a new browser based upon Firefox's core.

Google's interest in Firefox has also sparked questions following its hiring of two Mozilla developers and the registration of the gbrowser.com domain name. Google, however, has been less up front about its intentions than Ask Jeeves.

"Two weeks ago, Lanzone and I met with mozilla.org at their office in Mountain View. The main purpose was to discuss Ask Jeeves and mozilla.org working together and how Ask can make contributions to Mozilla that make sense," Luong wrote in a Web log posting.

Luong said Ask Jeeves was considering opening up the source of its desktop search software, and contributing the code to a Mozilla project. "We're open at two levels. Contributing just the core desktop indexing technology or possibly the entire desktop search application," he said.

Ask Jeeves is also interested in adding its search functionality into Firefox, replacing Google as the default Web crawler.

"We explained that we want to support and leverage Firefox by building extensions to and plug-ins within Firefox," said Luong. "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."