Apple’s motivation is to ensure that customers continue to buy a new iPhone every couple of years and don’t switch to Android. Google’s main priority is to funnel user data into the enormous advertising engine that accounts for most of its revenue. Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Imagesīaker’s pitch is that only Mozilla is motivated, first and foremost, to make using the web a pleasurable experience. Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation. The world’s second-most popular browser, Safari, is made by the world’s second-most valuable company – Apple. “And increasingly it has become clear that, no, you need someone looking out for you.”Ĭhrome, the world’s most popular browser, is made by the world’s fourth-most valuable company, Alphabet, the parent company of Google. “In the early days, we thought all companies and social networks cared about us and cared for us,” says Baker, speaking for web users as a whole. Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web. However, the rise of the potentially monopolistic web platform also creates a new opportunity – in fact, an urgent new mission. The Firefox browser, which had resisted the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, found itself faced with a far hardier opponent in the shape of Google Chrome. “For the last – I don’t know – three or four years, I’d say Mozilla has been remaking the organisation itself,” Baker says. Now, hopefully, it is on another upswing. Then, in the late 2000s, a resurgent Firefox faced near-fatal competition from Google’s Chrome. In the mid-90s, Netscape was killed by Microsoft with its Internet Explorer. Mozilla has had its ups and downs over the years: making a hugely popular web browser twice over, before succumbing each time to crushing competition from a well-funded tech behemoth. But the foundation was set up to shepherd the Mozilla organisation, which was formed in 1998 to oversee the development of a suite of web tools developed from another browser – Netscape Communicator.Ĭommunicator was Netscape’s fourth browser the first came out in 1994, making it the first commercial web browser the world had ever seen.Īll of which makes Mozilla the web’s oldest company or at least “the oldest thing on the consumer internet”, as the foundation’s chair, Mitchell Baker, put it when I met her in London recently. The not-for-profit foundation, which has as its aim the promotion of “openness, innovation and participation on the internet”, is best known for the Firefox browser, which it started developing in 2003.
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