As CEO and chairman of Mozilla, respectively, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker have overseen the huge growth of Firefox, the popular open-source browser.

The pair talk about this and more in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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I met John Lilly last October on a decidedly odd techie scavenger hunt in Hawaii– trapped in a van all day while searching for tikis and such, as if we were a geek Brady Bunch (yes, BoomTown works that hard for you)–and found him to be just the kind of quietly intelligent, thoughtful and self- effacing digital exec that Silicon Valley could use a lot more of in these often frivolous, look-at-me Web 2.0 days.

Soon after, in January, Lilly was named CEO of Mozilla Corporation, after serving its its COO, taking over for Mitchell Baker, who remains its chairman. Mozilla just launched its Firefox 3 browser to much success.

Here’s my video interview with him about where Mozilla is going next.

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