Twitter isn’t the only one with a birthday in June. The Mozilla Foundation is also celebrating its 8th anniversary today as it was ‘born’ on July 15, 2003. The milestone was trumpeted by the Mozilla Drumbeat twitter account today as it exclaimed “Happy Birthday, #Mozilla Foundation! Born July 15, 2003.”
Mozilla, of course, makes the free browser Firefox, which many of us came to know and love as an incredibly fantastic alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer back in the evil days of IE6. At the time that Firefox was released, IE 6 had a stupendous 95% hold on the market, forcing many people to use what is now considered to be one of the worst web browsers ever made.
Firefox offered a light and open-source alternative browser that has grown to adopt and then set many web standards throughout its life. Many credit the arrival and gain in popularity of Firefox with Microsoft jump starting the development of Internet Explorer again.
The Tweet went on to say that the best birthday present would be to join the Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is a non-profit that supports the open web and has created movements like the Drumbeat community in order to create tools for the open web. The memberships start at $5 for supporters, for which Mozilla gives you:
- Deep inner pride for helping Mozilla build a Web for everyone
- Access to cool Mozilla and Firefox gear that will impress your friends
- Good feelings in the cockles of your heart
If you choose to donate $30 instead, you’ll get a Firefox T-shirt for your troubles as well. If you’d like to contribute to the Mozilla Foundation for all of those years of using Firefox for free, you can do so at Mozilla.org. Oh, and IE6 was terrible.
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