Mozilla

Mozilla began in 1998, when Netscape, then a leading web browser company, released its browser's source code and started an open source project to keep developing it. Out of that came the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit created in 2003, and the Mozilla Corporation, a company it fully owns, which builds the products. Its mission, written in a public manifesto, is to keep the internet open and accessible to everyone, with privacy and user choice built in.

Its best-known product is Firefox, the web browser released in 2004. Firefox broke the near-monopoly of Internet Explorer in the 2000s and pushed the whole industry toward web standards. Today it matters for another reason: it is the last major browser that does not use Google's Chromium engine or Apple's WebKit. Firefox runs on Mozilla's own engine, Gecko, so the way the web works is not decided by just one or two companies.

Mozilla's work goes beyond the browser. It created the Thunderbird email client, runs MDN Web Docs, one of the most used references for web developers, and sponsored the early development of the Rust programming language. Most of its income has come from search deals, chiefly with Google for being Firefox's default search engine, which leaves it in the odd position of depending on its biggest competitor.