Last April, Mozilla announced that Gary Kovacs was stepping down as the organization’s CEO and that it would start looking for a replacement. At the time, Jay Sullivan took over as acting CEO in the midst of a number of leadership changes at Mozilla. Today, after almost a year of looking for a new CEO, Mozilla announced that JavaScript creator and current Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich would become its new CEO, effective immediately.

“I would first like to thank Jay Sullivan for his contributions to Mozilla and to the Web. He has been a passionate force at Mozilla whose leadership, especially during the last year, has been important to our success, in particular with Firefox OS. Thank you, Jay!” said Eich in a statement today. “I am honored to have the role of leading Mozilla, as we look forward to our audacious goals across all of our products and the project as a whole.”

Eich joined Netscape back in April 1995, where he created JavaScript. Later, he was among the founding members of the Mozilla Foundation, which was spun out of AOL in 2003 before it shut down Netscape development completely in 2007. Mozilla named him as its CTO in 2005.

In its announcement today, Mozilla says that Eich “brings Mozilla’s founding vision and boldness to our current initiatives. These traits are a unique asset, as Mozilla brings openness and choice through new initiatives such as Firefox OS and cloud services.”

As part of this transition, Li Gong will become Mozilla’s COO and a number of functions inside of Mozilla will move under his organization, including cloud services, IT, marketplace, mobile & research and platform engineering.

Sullivan, who has been at Mozilla for six years, will leave to “pursue new opportunities” after a transition period.