14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox is close to celebrating its first decade, though it's not quite there yet. But Mozilla, the organization behind the browser is much older than that, in fact, the group is celebrating its 15th birthday.
"Mozilla turned 15 years old. In these years, something radical has happened: the Web has become an everyday presence in the lives of billions of people. It’s made their lives better. Mozilla was a big part of this," Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker wrote.
Mozilla came about around the time that Netscape gave up the fight against Microsoft, which bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, made it free and came to dominate the market.
Netscape open sourced the code to its browser, but probably didn't believe much would come out of it. The source code was the base of the first Mozilla 1.0 browser, which the organization and community would continue to develop.
In fact, the Mozilla browser lives today in the form of Seamonkey. But Mozilla was never going to challenge IE, what was needed was a fresh start.
That came, fittingly, in the form of Phoenix, a new browser based on a lot of new code. Phoenix eventually became Firefox, with Firefox 1.0 being introduced in 2004.
Since then, Firefox and Mozilla have continued to shape the web. Even now, while Firefox may not have a huge market share, Mozilla's voice in defining web standards and technologies is important.
But the most trying time for Mozilla is now. Firefox may not be doing great on the desktop, but it's still holding on to a fifth of the market. That's not true in the mobile space, where Firefox is basically non-existent.
Mozilla is not only working on building a better Firefox for Android, but on building a completely new mobile operating system, Firefox OS. Considering that only Apple and Google have managed to build successful mobile operating systems to date, with plenty others trying, it's going to be tough.