Mozilla

A Return to Founders as Mozilla Moves Forward

March 24th, 2014

I’m happy to welcome Brendan Eich to a new role at Mozilla, that of our CEO. I also want to thank Jay Sullivan for his dedication to Mozilla over the years and in particular as our acting CEO this last year.

Brendan has been an absolutely foundational element of Mozilla and our success for the past 15 years. The parallels between Mozilla’s history and our future are very strong, and I am very happy with this combination of continuity and change to help us continue to fulfill our mission, as Mozilla has big ambitions: providing a rich, exciting online experience that puts people at the center of digital life.

We exceeded our wildest dreams with Firefox when we first released it 10 years ago. We moved the desktop and browsing environments to a much more open place, with far more options and control available to individuals.

When I look back at the early days that led to Firefox, I think mostly of the personalities that achieved this great success. Mozilla was a small band of people, mostly volunteers and a few employees, bound together by a shared mission and led by Brendan and me as co-founders of the Mozilla project. We were an unusual group to have such huge ambitions. Looking at us, most people thought we would never succeed. But we did. We succeeded because like-minded people joined with us to make Mozilla so much stronger, and to create amazing products that embody our values — products that people love to use.

Today we live in a different online era. This era combines desktop, mobile devices, cloud services, big data and a social layer. It is feature-rich, highly centralized, and focused on a few giant organizations that exert control over almost all aspects of the experience. Today’s computing environment is deeply in need of an open, exciting alternative that shows what the Open Web brings to this setting — something built on parts including Firefox OS, WebGL, asm.js, and the many other innovations being developed at Mozilla. It is comparable to the desktop computing environment we set out to revolutionize when we started Mozilla.

Mozilla needs to bring a similar scope of change to the new computing era. Once again, Mozilla needs to break down the walled gardens of online life and bring openness and opportunity to all. Once again, we have the chance to build products and communities in a way that no one else will. Once again, we will build something new and exciting.

Over the years I’ve worked with Brendan, we’ve each had a variety of roles, and we have always had a great partnership. I look forward to working closely together in this phase of Mozilla’s development. I hope you’ll join us.

mitchell

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