Project History

A few milestones for the Mozilla project. This may be used in the future for some timeline used as a reference for the Press. Feel free to edit to add dates and anecdotes.

• 1998/01/22 (or 23rd?): Netscape announces that the browser is free and that it will publish the source code of Netscape 5 "before the end of the quarter". See the Netscape press release: NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES MOZILLA.ORG, A DEDICATED TEAM AND WEB SITE SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE
• 1998/31/3: Netscape posts the source code on mozilla.org. See NETSCAPE ACCELERATES COMMUNICATOR EVOLUTION WITH FIRST RELEASE OF NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE TO DEVELOPER COMMUNITY VIA MOZILLA.ORG .
• November 1998: Netscape decides to rewrite most of the code from scratch
• 1999/04/01: Jamie JWZ Zawinsky resigns: resignation and postmortem. He points that one of the achievement so far are Bugzilla, Bonsai and Tinderbox, still used today.
• 2000/11/14: AOL/Netscape releases Netscape 6.0, which is obviously not yet a decent product. Posters on the Mountain View campus pretend that "The Code is Ready".
• 2001/08/19: Netscape 6.1 released : Netscape's Newest Browser Gives Consumers Efficiency, Power and Safety
• 2002/06/05: Mozilla 1.0 suite released.
• 2003/05/29: 750 millions dollars agreement between AOL and Microsoft, related to the antitrust complaint regarding the Netscape browser.
• 2003/07/15: Netscape CPD team disbanded. Mozilla Foundation announced the same day.
• 2004/11/09: Firefox 1.0 launched
• 2005/07/29: Mozilla Corporation announced
• 2005/11/29: Firefox 1.5 launched

See also: Netscape Browser history and A Netscape timeline.