On March 31, 1998, the Mozilla Project launched at Netscape with a mission to, “offer choice to users and drive innovation on the web.” That’s according to Mozilla’s list of 15 facts about what the organization has been doing over the past 15 years to achieve its goals of promoting “openness, opportunity, and opportunity on the internet.”
Mozilla is a non-profit that relies on volunteers and open innovation to deliver products like Firefox. Contributors and donors are located on every continent and have helped to translate Firefox into 89 languages. That means more than 95% of the world’s population can use Firefox. Clearly, Mozilla’s mission is working.
Ten years after The Mozilla Project launched, Mozilla set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads of a software program in a single day. On June 7, 2008, which was promoted as Firefox 3 Download Day, 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 were recorded establishing Firefox’s popularity and strength as a relationship brand.
Here are some highlights from the list of facts about Mozilla to show you how far this organization and its efforts have grown since 1998:
- More than 10,000 contributors supported Mozilla when it launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004 by paying for a full-page ad in The New York Times.
- Over 3 million Firefox Add-ons have been downloaded by users so far.
- More than 2 million visitors use the Mozilla Developer Network community each month to access online documentation, tutorials, tools, and more.
- Firefox OS will launch in 2013 for smartphone users.
Mozilla and its Firefox product grew because the company set brand expectations and consistently met those expectations again and again. Today, Firefox is still the second most popular web browser based on market share (behind Internet Explorer 10 and ahead of Google Chrome).
It’s been 15 years since The Mozilla Project launched, and the organization’s mission to keep the web open and accessible to all is just as relevant today as it was in 1998. As long as the brand continues to consistently meet consumers’ expectations based on its first 15 years of shaping consumer perceptions, the organization should continue to grow and thrive. With all of those thousands of volunteers, contributors, and donors, combined with millions of users around the world, the future is bright for Mozilla.
Image: Philippe Ramakers
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
