Mitchell Baker, chairperson of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp., is a lawyer-turned-tech evangelist who in the early 1990s helped set up the legal department at Netscape Communications Corp., later bought by AOL. Netscape is known best for the Web browser that lost the browser war with Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.
About 10 years ago, she helped found the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization, and in 2004, Mozilla launched its Firefox Web browser. The Economist has described Firefox’s tale as a curious one. Edited excerpts from an interview with Livemint Radio:
What is the curious tale?
The curious tale of Mozilla? Mozilla is the tale of something everyone knew could never happen. A few things happened in the early 1990s after Netscape’s great success. Microsoft appeared on the scene, Microsoft had its own browser. Eventually, through a series of activities that browser controlled something like 97%, meaning that 97 out of every 100 people who ever accessed the Internet always did it through one single means.
Innovative Web: Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker says the revenue relationship with Google is kept separate from the product and the relationship is irrelevant to what Firefox is or becomes. Reuters
And so Microsoft had the view that the browser was irrelevant, it was part of the operating system. It didn’t matter, and further development on it didn’t matter. They just disbanded their team and the experience got worse and worse. If you think back to say 2000, 2001 what it was like to use a browser with pop-up ads, spyware and machine slowing down and people being forced to get rid of their old machines and buying new ones to sort of start over.
And that, in turn, was a direct effect of having only one and no competition. But at the same time everyone knew it was impossible to compete with Microsoft in this space. And so it was left to Mozilla, the open-source small, scraggly child that no one really wanted except a few of us that were involved and no one thought it would ever succeed to take and fight this critical battle. Because it turns out that the browser is not irrelevant, it is the part that each one of us as a human being touches. It is the tool that we, as human beings, have to access the Internet and so it is not irrelevant, it is fundamental. And so, Firefox was launched in 2004.
What is Mozilla’s manifesto and what are you trying to achieve through Mozilla?
Mozilla is, at heart, an international public benefit organization. We are organized both legally and in our social covenants with each other to create public benefit and to build the Internet that is open and accessible and truly global and allows innovation across cultures and across a multitude of different business models and different companies. So the manifesto expresses that mission or that set of values.