Twenty-five years ago one of the cornerstones of the open Internet was born, the Mozilla.org project, designed to exploit and convey the creativity of thousands of programmers on the net and introduce the most innovative browsers to the market.
On February 23, 1998, Netscape Communications Corporation registered the domain, it was the foundation stone of the Firefox browser even if the actual availability of the program for surfing the Internet will take place four years later, with the launch of Phoenix 0.1, which later became Firefox .
Today the software is not as popular as it used to be: according to January 2023 data from the analysis firm StatCounter: as a percentage of use Firefox is at 3% behind Edge (4%), Safari (18%) and Chrome (65% ).
There could be a change of pace with the new course of search engines, which increasingly aim to integrate artificial intelligence features, as demonstrated by the investments of Microsoft, Google and Opera in the wake of the popularity of the ChatGpt software.
Mozilla was the code name for the Netscape browser at its founding.
It's a merger of the words 'Mosaic' and 'killer': a clear goal to supplant Mosaic, up to that point the most popular browser out there.
Given the similarity between the word Mozilla and Godzilla, employee and artist Dave Titus created a mascot for the project: a green lizard in boxer clothes, then reduced to a simple red stylized head of a T-Rex.