Mozilla

Posted Wed, 09/09/2009 - 13:53 by KevinBecher

Mozilla is both the name of a Foundation and a Corporation.

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is an independent non-profit organization developing and distributing various open source projects such as Firefox and Thunderbird. It was established in July 2003 with the aim of managing the daily operations (e.g. development and marketing) of the project. It's supported by individual donors and companies. The Headquarters are located in Mountain View, California.

The Mozilla Corporation is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. It was founded on August 3, 2005 to support the Foundation's money making activities and to manage business contracts. Even though all Mozilla applications are freeware, there is value generated by some search engine plug-ins used in Firefox, e.g. Amazon and eBay, who pay for the implementation of their search engines.

"It's not the case that someone is taking Firefox and making a lot of money. The revenue we have made is almost accidental. It was not initially expected, but it happened; so we needed to evolve the legal structure and fiscal structure to reflect this." - Tristan Nitot, Mozilla spokesman, concerning the establishment of Mozilla Corporation.

Name

The Name Mozilla originally was a codename for the Netscape Navigator Browser. It was created as a contraction of Mosaic killer (Mosaic was the first web browser which was able to display graphics on a web page).

History

In the mid-nineties Netscape introduced it's new Browser called Navigator. Inspired by the success, Microsoft released it's own Browser with the launch of Windows 95 (Internet Explorer 1.0). The competition between the two browsers became very hard, ending up in the so called browser wars, where both companies established their own standards, which were not compatible to each other. Microsoft added its browser to their operation system and also were offering it for free. Due to its unique distribution channel (distribution with the Windows operation system) they succeeded in the browser wars, gaining a market share of nearly 90 per cent in the late nineties. As a consequence, Netscape decided to give away its browser for free in 1998. In the same year the Mozilla project was created and the source code of Netscape Browser Suite was published. The code for the Firefox browser was derived from the code of Netscape Browser Suite, but later completely rewritten. Started as a community, a huge number of members contributed to the development of Mozilla Project's first release of the Mozilla Browser, which took place in the year 2002. In the same year, some community members released a modified version of the Mozilla Browser which was called Phoenix and later renamed to Firefox. The official release of Version 1.0 followed in the year 2004 and was a big success. Firefox has been downloaded over 100 million times within the first year. Since the last years Firefox hast been continuously advanced. The current Version is 3.5.2 (September 2009). In 2004 the first version of Mozilla's Thunderbird was released as well, following the huge success of Firefox (1 million downloads in the first 10 days).

Products

The Mozilla Foundation develops an number of projects. These are the most common:

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is the free open source cross platform web browser developed by Mozilla using Netscape's Gecko technology to display websites. Firefox is seen as one of the most safe browsers available and offers lots of features, e.g. tabbed browsing, one-click-bookmarking, easy customization, a password manage, a download manager and private browsing, just to name a few. More features can be added through add-ons as well.

Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free e-mail and news client. Like Firefox, it's cross platform useable. Thunderbird offers features like message tagging, an improved search, advanced security and more. Its look is customizable with various themes.

Lightning and Sunbird

Mozilla Lightning is an add-on for Thunderbird which was developed on the basis of the discontinued Mozilla Calendar. It's providing a calendar and scheduling functionality.

Mozilla Sunbird offers the same features but is a standalone version that does not need Thunderbird to be installed.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a web-based open source issue tracking and testing solution. It was designed to help in managing software development. It's described as highly capable and feature-rich and is in use in many open source projects (over 900) like Mozilla, Apache and Eclipse.

Seamonkey

Seamonkey is an all-in-one internet application suite. It arose from the Mozilla Application Suite which was discontinued in March 2005. The first version was published in January 2006. It contains a browser, an e-mail and newsgroups client, a html editor and an IRC chat client and is community driven.

Camino

Camino is a browser developed especially for the use with Mac OS X. It was released in February 2006. Some key features of Camino are a pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing and an ad-blocker.

Relevance for e-commerce

As a browser, Firefox is essential to view websites. The market share of Firefox is at around 23 per cent at the moment, so it's the most used browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The fact that sites like eBay and Amazon pay for the implementation of their search plug-ins is a proof of the importance for the business world and e-commerce.

Thunderbird is, as an email client, very important as a means of business communication. Integrating Sunbird even increases the value as it allows to manage dates and deadlines.

Sources

InfoWorld, Issue 32/2005, p. 23

Network Dictionary, Saratoga CA: Javvin Technologies, Inc, p. 318

Meeker, H. J. The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, p. 19

Smart, John Ferguson. Java Power Tools. Sebastopol, Calif: O'Reilly, p. 747

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/firefox-market-share.aspx?sample=28&qpri...

http://www.mozilla.org/about/history.html

https://library.mozilla.org/The_History_of_Mozilla

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_%28software%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_thunderbird