While this may seem to be an ambitious effort, the effort is not unprecedented for Mozilla, Eich said. Founded in 2003 out of the ashes of Netscape, which was then controlled by AOL-Time Warner, the Mozilla Foundation set out to provide a competitive alternative to the then-dominant browser, Internet Explorer, as a way of promoting the use of company neutral standards across the Web. The mission was to "keep the Web open, interoperable and evolving, and represent the user above all else," Eich said.

Using the code from the Netscape browser, which had grown increasingly out of favor, Mozilla succeeded at this mission, namely by developing the popular Firefox browser, Eich said. "We got what we wanted. We got competition. We've gotten productive work in the standards bodies," he said. He pointed to how Microsoft's share of the browser market has declined in the years since the debut of Firefox -- and the increasing popularity of other browsers such as Apple Safari and Google Chrome.

Now, the company wants to renew this battle in the world of mobile devices, Eich said. Mozilla calls this initiative . The idea behind it is that mobile applications can be written once, using the Web platform, and they then can be deployed across different mobile devices, such as an Android device or an Apple iPhone, for instance.

For developers, writing to a Web platform would save development time, because each application would only have to be written once, Eich argued. And consumers could benefit by being able to run their applications across different devices, as well as be able to access their data no matter the device or the software used.

Some elements are already in place: HTML5 and associated technologies such as CSS and JavaScript can provide the tools the developers need ("There is nothing that Flash can do that browsers can't," he said).