Microsoft has offered to help the Mozilla Corporation port Firefox and Thunderbird to its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.

In an email to a Mozilla development mailing list, Sam Ramji, director of Microsoft's open source software lab, offered the project access to Windows Vista Readiness lab this December.

The event on Microsoft's campus allows developers to test their applications for potential Windows Vista compatibility issues. Microsoft engineers will be available to provide one-on-one support if needed.

"In the past [Microsoft] has only invited commercial software developers to these labs," Ramji wrote in his email.

"I'm committed to evolving our thinking beyond commercial companies to include open source projects, so I went to the non-trivial effort of getting slots for non-commercial open source projects."

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the email's authenticity to vnunet.com.

Firefox over the past years has chipped away at Internet Explorer's market share lead and currently runs on nearly 13 per cent of the world's computers, according to data from Onestat.

Thunderbird is an email and news client developed by the Mozilla Corporation.

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