On July 15 , 2003 , AOL Time Warnergave Netscape the ax , disbanding the company that had started the back breaker - com boom with its incredible IPO in 1995 . about all the engineers were laid off , and the Netscape merchandise retinue was stop ( though a handful of products remained in a kind of maintenance mode , and the Netscape brand was slap onto a news assembling site in 2006 ) . It was the ending of an era .
On that day , blogger Anil Dashsuggested that Google get involvedand make a " Google browser app , " perhaps by charter the place - off Netscape team . Guess what ? Google did hire some of those phratry , and launched Chrome in 2008 . Perhaps the exclusive biggest moment in that passage was whenGoogle rent the Firefox lead developerin January 2005 . ( Firefox 1.0 had just been bring out in November 2004 . )
Years earlier , Netscape did something very prescient : Theymade the inwardness of their web browser app Cartesian product open sourcein 1998 , right before AOL bought them . This meant that the browser app could know on disregardless of what happen with its corporate parent . At that time they also createdMozilla.org , a community rallying distributor point to organize the open source development effort .
Along with mass layoffs at Netscape on July 15 , 2003 , the Mozilla Foundation wasofficially born , with a $ 2 million pledge from AOL . The foundation is a California public benefit bay window lodge with furthering the heart-to-heart source work of the pre - existing Mozilla organisation . It did its line , as Firefox , Thunderbird , Sunbird , and a salmagundi of other assailable reservoir merchandise arrived throughout the 2000s , make through a massive collaborationism of engineers .
In this multi - class saga of the demise and rebirth of Netscape , perhaps the most authoritative moments come about in 1998 and 1999 , when Mozilla was first take form and then Netscape was bought . as luck would have it , a picture show crew was present to document that clock time . The documentaryCode Rushfocused on that era , and particularly the rushing to get the assailable source code released . That film was laterreleased under a Creative Commons license . Because of that , you canlegally watch the motion-picture show online . It ’s just under an hr long . Have a look :
