Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser, is putting its weight behind new efforts to significantly improve the speed of the country's internet connections.

On Friday, the browser maker unveiled the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund, which will disburse $300,000 in grants to software projects that make use of the gigabit fiber services in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Kansas City, Kansas, which can transmit as much as a billion bits of information a second.

Also backed by the National Science Foundation and an organization called US Ignite, the fund will award 10 grants in each city, ranging from $5,000 and $30,000, aiming to spark a new breed of web service for use on this new breed of internet connection. Although Mozilla will be disbursing the money, the funds are being provided by the National Science Foundation. Big-name internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast have been slow to roll our super-high-speed connections, and Mozilla – like Google and others – wants to ensure that internet infrastructure continues to evolve here in the U.S. as quickly as it does overseas.

Google Fiber, the search giant's fiber service that went live in 2012, is probably the most famous gigabit internet service, but the first city to offer such blisteringly fast speeds was Chattanooga, Tennessee. Since then, many other cities – such as Lafayette, Louisiana and Wilson, North Carolina – have followed Chattanooga's lead in creating their own gigabit internet services. Google has also announced that it will roll out services in Austin, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah.

These services provide over 50 times the internet speeds offered by traditional connections. That seems like nothing but a good thing, but many people are still wondering how we can truly take advantage of all that extra speed. The Mozilla fund aims to change that. It will award money to projects that "demonstrate how emerging gigabit technologies are relevant in people’s everyday lives." But it also wants applications that are "rooted in the local community, and that are pragmatic, deployable in the near term, have measurable impact, and are re-usable and shareable with others."

Mozilla will also establish organizations dedicated to providing digital media education in Chattanooga and Kansas City as part of the program. The not-for-profit has already established similar organizations – called Hive Learning Communities – in other cities, including New York and Chicago.

The new program follows a previous gigabit development fund called the Mozilla Ignite Apps Challenge, which awarded grants to the developers of applications such as an emergency response system and interactive, virtual fitness studio. That may seem like small potatoes. But you have to start somewhere.

Update: This story has been updated to clarify the role of the National Science Foundation.