Mozilla began on March 31, 1998, the day Netscape Communications released the source code of its Communicator browser suite to the public. Mozilla’s own history page states plainly that “the Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code.” The newly created mozilla.org was set up as the governance body for the resulting open-source project.
In a retrospective marking the project’s twentieth anniversary, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker described March 31, 1998 as “the day the Mozilla code is open-sourced to the world, and the day the Mozilla Project is formally launched.” Between Netscape’s January 1998 announcement of intent and that launch, the team removed proprietary third-party code, created the Mozilla Public License, and stood up mozilla.org as a home for community contributors.
Mozilla today is organized as a not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation with a wholly owned Mozilla Corporation that develops products. Its stated mission is to “put control of the internet back in the hands of the people using it,” and it describes itself as “a global community of passionate volunteers, fellows and contributors” building the internet since 1998.
Mozilla’s best known product is the Firefox web browser, whose 1.0 release in 2004 helped break Internet Explorer’s near-total dominance of the web and pushed the industry back toward open standards.