25 Years of Mozilla: Pioneering an Equitable Internet Journey

Mitchell Baker, co-founder and current CEO of Mozilla, recently announced that the organization has celebrated over 25 years of existence, emphasizing its continued commitment to fostering an equitable and healthy internet.

Established on March 31st, 1998, Mozilla originated from Netscape’s public release of browser source code under the mozilla.org domain. Initially, the project aimed to compete with the widely popular Mosaic browser. The original moniker, Mosaic Killer, was later combined with the name of the iconic Japanese monster, Godzilla, resulting in the well-known name Mozilla.

Following the formation of the Mozilla development community, the team began revamping the outdated code from the Netscape era. They introduced more stable and feature-rich designs and officially launched Mozilla on June 5th, 2002. Subsequently, Mozilla’s source code served as the foundation for Netscape 6 and Netscape 7, leading to the release of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client. As Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained prominence, Mozilla shifted its focus to compete with Microsoft, and later Google Chrome, while consistently emphasizing its dedication to balancing internet equality.

In addition to championing internet equality in their browser products, Mozilla has also launched various initiatives aimed at fostering equitable web application development. These include the Common Voice project, an open-source voice recognition engine introduced in July 2017, and the recent establishment of Mozilla.ai, a startup aimed at creating a trustworthy and independent open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem.