Celebrating 15 Years Of A Better Web

On March 31, 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.

Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.

In our first phase, Mozilla brought competition, choice and empowerment to the World Wide Web on the desktop. We did this by bringing a phenomenally better experience to hundreds of millions of people with Firefox. At the same time, we used Firefox to drive openness and opportunity across the whole Web ecosystem — open source, open standards, open development process for Firefox, and the ability for people everywhere to participate in creating Firefox, in tuning it to fit their local environments, in customizing and extending it to fit their needs, all on their own terms and without needing permission from Mozilla or anyone else.