Time flies when you're having fun

By mitchell

July 14, 2004

It's already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it's been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic.

The Mozilla project has long been an open source technology leader. With our new Firefox and Thunderbird products, we are now focusing on bringing a better Internet experience to millions of new users.

There have been many highlights for the Mozilla Foundation this year:

We've built a potent development team to lead continued innovation. Our small team is built entirely of veterans with many years of experience in the Mozilla project.
We turned our attention to the end user for the first time, after years of being solely a technology project. The result: Firefox (for browsing) and Thunderbird (for email). 1.0 launches for both products are now just a few months away. To help end users we've started offering CDs (we ship more than 5000 CDs for every new release!), telephone support and Mozilla wares (our new tshirts are proving to be a big hit). With help from David Shea and others, we've also given our web site a make-over.
Our friends in Europe have created Mozilla Europe [ http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ ], a non-profit organization that's working to promote Mozilla throughout the continent. Similar efforts are now underway in other parts of the world.
We continue to innovate. Just a few weeks ago, the Mozilla Foundation spearheaded an announcement [ http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-06-30.html ] with Macromedia, Apple, Opera, Sun Microsystems and Adobe to deliver a richer plugin experience. Mozilla engineers are active participants in the WHAT Working Group [ http://www.whatwg.org/ ], a collaborative effort with Opera and Apple engineers to bring innovation to web forms and other parts of the web.
US CERT, a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, recently recommended [ http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/713878 ] that Internet Explorer users switch to a different browser to avoid recent dangerous security exploits affecting IE. Secunia, a leading third party security firm, also recommends [ http://secunia.com/advisories/11793/ ] using another browser.

The results?

5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That's close to 200,000 downloads a day for the last 30 days.
More than 300 million page views on our web site for the year. This month alone, an estimated 10 million visitors have come to mozilla.org - and we're just halfway into the month.
Amazing buzz for Firefox, with more than 20,000 web sites linking to the Firefox product page!

Most importantly, the tide is finally beginning to turn: after years of increasing monopolization of the web browser market, Mozilla-based browsers (browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine, that is) are now gaining modest but noticeable market share. Both Web Side Story and OneStat.com, leading web analytics firms, confirm [ http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1622837,00.asp ] this trend.

All of this terrific news wouldn't have been possible without help from lots of individuals and organizations. The Mozilla Foundation is a small organization (just a dozen people), but we have lots of friends and contributors:

Financial assistance from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Mitch Kapor allowed us to launch the Foundation.
IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and others employ dozens of engineers who dedicate their full time energy to the Mozilla Foundation.
MozillaZine [ http://www.mozillazine.org/ ] has become a lively hub for Mozilla news, community feedback and end user support.
MozDev [ http://www.mozdev.org/ ] is home to hundreds of extensions and other projects that keep Mozilla on the leading edge.
Close to 4000 individuals have donated [ http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html ] almost $10,000 per month to the Mozilla Foundation.
The Visual Identity Team [ http://www.mozilla.org/projects/marketing/ ] has done an amazing job on the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and default themes - and they're not done yet!
A consortium of universities, lead by Oregon State University, is providing server infrastructure helping meet bandwith requirements for our significant (and growing) downloads.
MozSource [ http://store.mozilla.org/ ], the company that operates the Mozilla Store, ships thousands of CDs and Mozilla merchandise every month, processes a good chunk of the donations coming to the Mozilla Foundation, and is now sponsoring SilverOrange to improve the Mozilla web site. SilverOrange [ http://www.silverorange.com/ ] is also doing a lot of this work on a volunteer basis.
Most importantly: the thousands of hackers and testers who participate in producing great software.

What's next? Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 - just around the corner. But don't wait. Download the preview releases today and help spread the word. And if you prefer to go with a proven, mature Internet suite that's been around for years, make sure to download Mozilla 1.7.

Help us take back the web!

- The Mozilla Team

10:10 PM