Mozilla taps a new chief from SAP

MIGUEL HELFT
International Herald Tribune
10-18-2010
Mozilla taps a new chief from SAP
Byline: MIGUEL HELFT
Type: News

After a search that lasted nearly six months, Mozilla has named Gary Kovacs, an executive at the German software giant SAP, as its new chief executive.

After a search that lasted nearly six months, Mozilla has named Gary Kovacs, an executive at the German software giant SAP, as its new chief executive.
John Lilly, who has been Mozilla's chief executive for the last three years, has announced that he would leave to join Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm.

Mr. Kovacs is currently senior vice president in charge of mobile products at SAP. Before that, he was a senior executive at Sybase, which SAP owns. Between 2003 and 2008, he held various senior executive positions at Macromedia, and later, at Adobe, after those two companies merged.

Mr. Kovacs, who will begin Nov. 8, joins Mozilla at a time when its flagship product, the open-source Web browser Firefox, faces growing competition from Google's Chrome, as well as Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Mozilla's success has largely been built around Firefox. The browser was introduced in 2004, when Microsoft's slow and buggy Internet Explorer had a virtual monopoly on Web browsers. Since then, the browser market has become highly competitive and innovative again.

Despite increased competition, the number of Firefox users has continued to grow, and the browser's market share has held steady at around 23 percent for the past 15 months, according to NetApplications, which tracks browser use.

Copyright International Herald Tribune Oct 18, 2010