Of course our project and technologies go back much further, but it was on this day in 2003 that the Mozilla Foundation was launched.
Since then, we've grown up as a project, transitioning from the old Mozilla suite to the stand-alone Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client while increasing the size and capabilities of our community of contributors by an order of magnitude or more. We've developed as an organization, from half a dozen full-timers to about 250 today. We've increased our influence on the Web, extended our reach from a few early adopters to more than 300 million Firefox users worldwide. And we've helped to move the entire industry forward by introducing great technologies and user experiences and by re-invigorating the competitive landscape.
There were a lot of folks that said it wasn't possible, that no one, and definitely not a tiny non-profit open source project, could take on Microsoft's overwhelming IE monopoly -- especially after AOL cut the cord. Then again, people have been writing Mozilla's obituary since 1998 and yet we keep moving forward, every day working to build a better Internet for everyone.
And I think that's one of Mozilla's great strengths. We're in this for the long haul -- and it's been and continues to be a long haul. We didn't get 75 language versions of Firefox into the hands of 300 million users in 160 countries overnight. We didn't go from zero to almost a quarter of global Web usage in one or even two releases.
The Web is a very large and growing thing and it moves a lot slower than most people understand. But we're here for the long haul. And we're here for the public benefit.
I think that's pretty important and so today I celebrate everyone that has been and everyone that currently is working with Mozilla to bring more choice, innovation, and participation to the Web.
