30th March 1998
Netscape Communicator is released as an open source project.

Knowing that Internet Explorer had become the dominant browser, Netscape released the source code of Netscape Communicator 4.0 in the hope that it would become an open source project.

However, the software was too complicated to develop as an open source project and work shifted to developing the more modular Gecko engine. The Firefox browser's roots lie in this project.