Browser Security News

The unconventional company hopes to gain market share and outfox the competition with a new version of its Firefox browser

It was the summer of 2004, and a group of 10 techies huddled together in an office in Mountain View, Calif., facing a daunting task. They had embarked on an ambitious effort to create a Web browser that could go mano-a-mano with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But having spent much of the $2 million that got them off the ground, they lacked the budget to build a mass consumer brand.

So they decided to take a marketing gamble. This group, who would later form the Mozilla Corporation, comprised die-hard believers in the so-called open-source method of software development, where power to shape programs is ceded to a vast army of developers, rather than small teams of corporate engineers. Could that same ethos, they wondered, be harnessed to build a brand? Mozilla Goes Mainstream