Mozilla's Catch-Up Strategy for Mobile

When Gary Kovacs ran the New York City marathon this year—his first ever—the chief executive officer of Mozilla wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Web browser made by his nonprofit. Spectators shouted “Firefox!” at him as he ran by. The cheers made him proud—and anxious about Mozilla’s fate in a smartphone world dominated by corporations like Google. “My thoughts started to take twists and turns,” he says. “We cannot have one commercially minded organization shape our lives.”

The Mozilla project was born in 1998 with the mission to provide an open, customizable counterweight to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which accounted for more than 90 percent of the browser market at the time. Today, Firefox, an open-source project led by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif., with millions of contributors around the world, has nearly a quarter of the market. Many of the features it pioneered—such as pop-up blocking and virus protection—are commonplace. Mozilla’s original goal of spurring competition and innovation seems to have been met.