Mozilla released the free browser Firefox 1.0, in November of 2004, and has been agressivly promiting it online.

Microsoft Internet Explorer was a hot-button issue in the mid to late 1990s as Microsoft defended anti-trust and corporate monopoly allegations.  One issue at hand was Web browsing and its integration into Windows 95 and 98.

Mosaic, one of the first Web browsers developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (NCSA), was created well before the Web was a commercial venue.  Mosaic was one of a few browsers available for educators and researchers online in the early 1990’s.

In 1994 several of the original programmers who developed Mosaic formed Netscape Communications and released the first commercial browser: Netscape Navigator.  By August of 1995 Microsoft had developed its own browser to challenge Netscape’s and included it in Windows 95.  Having the upper hand with a strong existing distribution channel, Microsoft was able to crush Netscape. By the end of the decade Internet Explorer had taken the Web browser market away from the folks who invented it by rolling the technology into its existing operating system.

Rapidly losing ground, Netscape executives were worried that if Microsoft controlled the browser they would control the Web and all of its standards. Netscape turned to open source in a last effort to save itself.  In 1998 Netscape announced that its latest browser Netscape Communicator would be released free of charge and that the source code for communicator would also be free.  Soon after this announcement Netscape was acquired by America Online, which continued to release revisions of Netscape browsers alongside Mozilla releases.

In 2003, AOL established the Mozilla Foundation to oversee the open source development of Mozilla.  By late 2004 Mozilla had released its first offshoot browser Firefox. Firefox 1.0, which has recorded nearly five million downloads, is being billed as the “next-generation” Web browser, however it is not the first major release of a product using Mozilla source code.

Apple Computer developed the Safari browser from Mozilla code and included the open source application as part of its partially open source Mac OS X.  Until Safari, Apple had distributed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as part of the Macintosh’s operating system.