Careers at Mozilla

Mission

Mozilla’s mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

History

It was 1998 and Jamie Zawinski was working as a software developer at Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape had just announced that its Netscape Communicator internet suite and the associated source code would be free. Zawinski saw an opportunity and registered Mozilla.org the next day. Mozilla, a portmanteau of Mosaic and Godzilla, started as an internal Netscape project to promote open dialog and development of Netscape’s source code.

A small group of Netscape employees were tasked with the new project. The group was given responsibility for the development of Netscape Communicator 5. The original vision, for Mozilla to act as a service provider to companies which could commercialize their source code, came to an end when AOL, Netscape’s parent company, greatly reduced its involvement in Mozilla in 2003.

In July 2003, the Mozilla Foundation took over as the steward of the Mozilla project. The new foundation was given some resources from Netscape, including a $2 million donation, and a three-person team to assist with the transition. Soon afterwards, Mozilla announced that it would be focusing on two flagship products, the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email application.

In August 2005, Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation. The new company was responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products. In 2006, Mozilla received $66.8 million in revenues, $61.5 million of which was attributed to serach royalties from Google. To this day, Mozilla draws 80% of its revenues from its business with Google, primarily the designation of Google as the default search engine in Firefox. In a report released in 2012, Mozilla stated that its annual revenue had reached $163 million.

In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership with Yahoo!. The deal would mean Yahoo! Is now the default search engine in Firefox. However, the Yahoo! Search engine would just be a fron-tend to Microsoft’s Bing search engine technology. The current CEO of Mozilla is Mitchell Baker, who replaced Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, in 2014.

In 2014, Mozilla had an annual revenue of over $329 million. The company is based in Mountain View, California and employs over 1000 people.

Benefits at Mozilla