On July 15, 2003, the Mozilla Foundation burst forth from Netscape, and in one fell swoop both created and cemented its preeminent position as the champion of The Open Web. A flurry of Firefox beta builds were released — first under the name of Phoenix, then Firebird, and eventually Firefox — and version 1.0 was finally released in November 2004. Thunderbird 1.0, which started life as Minotaur, was also released around the same time.

Today — eight years and three days after Mozilla was founded — some 400 million web surfers use Firefox, tens of millions use Thunderbird, and the state of the World Wide Web couldn’t be healthier. It’s hard to imagine now, with the Big Three browsers vying for your attention, but back in 2002 there was only one web browser: Internet Explorer. Thanks to Windows XP, IE6 owned 95% of the market, and to this day it is because of Windows XP’s enduring undeath that IE6 still has 10% of the world’s browser share. Mozilla’s early builds of Phoenix and Firebird started to gain traction in 2003, however, and by Firefox 1.0’s release in 2004 IE’s trend of domination had begun its steady reversal — and today, some nine years down the line, IE has only gained in market share twice: first with the release of IE7 and Vista, and then with the release of IE9 earlier this year.

It’s hard to put into words the contribution that Mozilla and its army of open source developers has made to the web, the internet, and thus society itself. If Mozilla hadn’t risen to challenge Microsoft, today’s two billion internet surfers might still be using IE6. You could go one step further and say that without Firefox — without the competition that drove an increase in JavaScript performance and the adherence to standards — we might even be living in a web without Google or Facebook or Twitter. It is thanks to Firefox that we have browsers that are capable of doing more than rendering images, basic CSS, and a scrolling marquee or two.

But, to reiterate, it’s hard to put Mozilla’s entire contribution into words — so we’re going to use pictures and words instead. Dive in to learn about the inauguration of the Mozilla Organization way back in 1998, the restructuring as Mozilla Foundation in 2003, the rapturous release of Firefox 1.0 and its worldwide launch parties, the creation and purpose of Mozilla Labs, and more!