History of Mozilla

Mozilla was created out of the ashes of one of the world’s most spectacular software failures. Netscape Navigator, the pioneering web browser company of the late 1990s, had gone from internet king to also-ran in a matter of months. The cause — Microsoft’s aggressive bundling of Internet Explorer — hardly seemed fair. But most industry watchers were resigned to a future where browsers would be free and ubiquitous. They were hardly a product you could build a company around.

Then, in a small stroke of genius, Netscape decided that it would transform its browser into an open source project. It created the Mozilla project to manage this process and develop the next version of Netscape’s integrated browser, mail, and chat application suite. That software initiative slowly crumbled in the face of competitors with more money and greater reach. But in the following years, the Mozilla team morphed itself into a different kind of organization — the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, dedicated to promoting open web standards and web literacy. (Not to mention a handful of Utopian-tinged principles laid out in the famous Mozilla manifesto.)

Shortly after, a group of Mozilla developers rebooted their browser efforts with Firefox, and spun it off into a separate, wholly owned corporation that still funds the Mozilla Foundation to this day. Had these technologies stayed locked up with AOL (the company that bought Netscape), they would have died years ago, worn away by the changing winds of internet fashion. In fact, even AOL gave up on the software it acquired with Netscape, switching to Internet Explorer shortly before it slipped into irrelevance.

Mozilla’s greatest Product

Firefox

Firefox is Mozilla’s famous product. Now Edge and Chrome are more popular than Firefox , but it’s even an good alternative browser.

Mozilla advanced some of today’s most important web technologies. Here are four of their best initiatives.

Rust

Rust’s appeal stretches across the aisle. Developers who believe that C++ is too permissive and error-prone love Rust. Rust has been ranked as the most loved programming language in Stack Overflow’s developer survey every year since 2016.

But now , contributing to the Rust language is no longer a priority for the new Mozilla. In 2020, they cut dedicated Rust developers and the Servo team that sought to build a new, Rust-powered browser engine.

In August 2020, Mozilla laid off 250 of its 1,000 employees worldwide. The team behind Servo, a browser engine written in Rust, was completely disbanded.

On February 8, 2021, the formation of the Rust Foundation was announced by its five founding companies (AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla).

Rust has been adopted by companies including Amazon, Discord, Dropbox, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft now.

MDN

MDN’s full name is he Mozilla Developer Network

MDN is a massive resource of high-quality developer documentation. It’s the best web developer document center. I belive it.

If you want get an answer about web technoly, you’ve probably encountered one of MDN’s gems before. Perhaps you’ve used its exhaustive CSS property reference, or its well organized HTML DOM reference.

Mozilla have so many Product. The best email client thunderbird , The best browser firefox, the best web document MDN, and RUST.

But Mozilla like a technical man, not very good at making money.

Maybe Mozill won’t disappear, but it’s hard to live.