https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
Brendan Eich (Creator of JavaScript)
The connection between Netscape and Mozilla is one of the most famous “phoenix” stories in tech history. Essentially, Mozilla is the open-source offspring that survived long after its parent company, Netscape, was destroyed in the first “Browser War” against Microsoft.
In 1994, when Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape, their goal was to displace Mosaic (the first popular web browser, which Andreessen had also helped create).
The Portmanteau: They gave their project the internal codename “Mozilla”—a combination of “Mosaic Killer” and “Godzilla.”
By 1998, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was winning the market because it was bundled for free with Windows. In a desperate, radical move to stay relevant, Netscape decided to release the source code of its browser to the public for free.
The Birth of mozilla.org: On March 31, 1998, Netscape established the Mozilla Organization to coordinate the development of this open-source code
The original Netscape code was old and “messy,” so the Mozilla team made the controversial decision to trash the old code and rewrite the entire browser engine from scratch
In late 1998, AOL bought Netscape. For a few years, AOL funded the Mozilla project, using the code the community built to create Netscape 6 and 7. However, as AOL lost interest in the browser market, they began laying off the Netscape team
2003 Independence: To ensure the project didn’t die with Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation was created as a non-profit. AOL provided the initial $2 million in seed funding and then stepped away, effectively making Mozilla an independent entity.