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It was six years ago, in 2000, when I began working on Mozilla accessibility. Back then, Firefox didn’t exist. Mozilla’s browser shipped as part of an application suite along with an e-mail program, an HTML editor, and an address book. The entire suite was called Mozilla Seamonkey, although for business purposes there was a variation called Netscape 6. By either name, the software was regarded as clunky and overly complex, even by true believers. Mozilla had a tiny market share for years and was not highly regarded by either users or decision makers.

But Mozilla had true believers, and I was one of them. What kept the true believers going during those hard times? It was the profound fact that in the open model of development, any person or organization can make an impact. People from all walks of life came together to plan the future of the Web. Mozilla development wasn’t owned by any one person. It just happened that Netscape employed most of the developers who worked on it. In fact nothing — not even a massive layoff of the Netscape developers — could derail the continued development of Mozilla.

Astonishingly, Netscape’s big layoff ("Black Tuesday") actually made the Mozilla project stronger. The core group of the most passionate developers started to grow, month by month. And these individuals found themselves with a wide open opportunity to change the future of the Web. Some were motivated by technology and standards, while others were motivated to make the Web work better for ordinary people. IBM Accessibility Center | Resources | Firefox: An open source accessibility success story