Not many people noticed at the time, but the first version of Phoenix (later renamed to Firefox) was also released by Mozilla community members that year with the goal of providing the best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people. This version featured many improvements to the browser, email client and other applications included in the suite, but not many people were using it.īy 2002, well over 90% of internet users were browsing with Internet Explorer. People contributed to Mozilla in different ways, but everyone was passionate about creating free software that would enable people to have a choice in how they experienced the internet.Īfter several years of development, Mozilla 1.0, the first major version, was released in 2002. Within the first year, new community members from around the world had already contributed new functionality, enhanced existing features and became engaged in the management and planning of the project itself.īy creating an open community, the Mozilla project had become larger than any one company.Ĭommunity members got involved and expanded the scope of the project’s original mission - instead of just working on Netscape’s next browser, people started creating a variety of browsers, development tools and a range of other projects. It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code. Learn more History of the Mozilla Project Read about our vision for the Web and how we intend to pursue that vision.

Firefox history