15 Years of Mozilla – My #webstory

It’s hard to believe it’s been 15 years. It seems like only yesterday that I was working with the Netscape for OS/2 team to make sure that all the back-end OS/2 changes made it into the source code release.

badge

Being a contributor to Mozilla has allowed me to have some amazing experiences.

  • Working with some incredible people in the partner engineering center at Netscape. I couldn’t possibly name them all, but a lot of the Mozilla relationships I have now started in that building.
  • Leading the team that ported Mozilla to OS/2 as the IBM Web Browser.
  • Leading the team that ported Firefox to OS/2.
  • Traveling around the world talking to people about OS/2 browsers.
  • Getting to meet Sergey Brin in the early days of Google at Technical Advisory Group meetings with Mozilla, IBM, Google, Red Hat and others.
  • Taking Blake Ross to meet Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, to talk about Firefox.
  • Working with IBM Israel and IBM Egypt to get bidirectional language support (Hebrew and Arabic) into Mozilla.
  • Working on Operator and getting microformats support into Firefox
  • Creating the CCK and enabling hundreds of enterprises to customize and deploy Firefox.
  • Releasing a Firefox version of IE8 Activites before IE8 had it.
  • Starting Kaply Consulting after leaving IBM which enabled me to continue to develop and advocate for Firefox.

Thanks, Mozilla, for 15 years. And thanks to all the people who have helped me get here.


Comments

7 responses to “15 Years of Mozilla – My #webstory”

  1. Thank you for all the work done and for all the help!

  2. I am really interested in contributing to Mozzila. Though I am still 15 years, but I know Java, C and Python. Can you please tell me how to go about with ??

    1. Mike Kaply Avatar
      Mike Kaply

      Awesome! The place to start is here:

      http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

  3. Congrats, Mike — great contributions!

  4. Well done, Mike.

  5. Thanks for the look back.
    Glad to hear someone still remembers OS/2 … I was a developer for a real long time there and loved it. So sad it’s gone.

  6. It has been great working with you over the years Mike.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *