by Stephen Shankland
November 19, 2008 12:47 PM PST

Things just got a lot more complicated for Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chairman and "chief lizard wrangler." Gone are the days when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the sole rival for Mozilla's Firefox.

A new open-source browser, Google Chrome, has come to town, and it's from the company that provided $66 million of the Mozilla Foundation's $75 million in 2007 revenue. There are other browser alternatives--Opera and Safari, for example--but Chrome is likely to catch on with the same techno-savvy, early-adopter, Google-proficient crowd that's been so passionate about Firefox. Baker, though, isn't worried.

For one thing, she argues, Mozilla gets its Google revenue from shared advertising revenue generated when people use Mozilla's built-in Google search abilities. In other words, Mozilla is just another advertising partner--a status Google was willing to extend to a far greater competitor, Yahoo, though, of course, Google backed away from that deal when threatened with a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit.

For another, she doesn't feel threatened by Chrome's market share. That's not to say she's complacent about it, though. I asked her opinion about Google, Chrome, the new HTML version 5, the future of the Web, and other matters on Tuesday. Here's an edited transcript of our chat.