Mozilla's Source Code Turns 10

On Monday, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated the 10th anniversary of the first release of its source code. On March 31st, 1998, Netscape released the code to its Netscape Communicator 5.0 browser under an open source license, birthing the Mozilla project.

In fact, you can read that press release here.

Since then, though, we've seen the Netscape browser die, and Firefox born, and we've even seen Firefox make a dent in Internet Explorer's market share.

In fact, Firefox has even made inroads in the Enterprise. Monday, Forrester Research released a report, Enterprise Desktop And Web 2.0/SaaS Platform Trends, 2007, which is a one-month study of 50,000 “enterprise users.”

In December 2007, according to Forrester, Internet Explorer had 79% of the Enterprise browser market, while Firefox had 18% and other browsers such as Opera, Safari, etc. were lumped together for the remaining 3%.

Personally, I use IE at work for all work-related activity, for much the same reason that many people do: I have to. However, I use Firefox for personal web browsing, and in a pinch I've used Firefox with IE Tab (if you haven't tried IE Tab, I recommend it).

Still, it's easiest to use IE for most Enterprise uses, at least in my company, and I doubt that will change for most. An 18% market share was probably never envisioned, however, so it's a great feat that Firefox has gotten this far.