Mozilla chief executive officer (CEO) Gary Kovacs has stepped down after two years in the position, with the company saying he had accomplished the goals he set out to achieve.
Kovacs was appointed the company’s third CEO in November 2010, but will leave his job “later this year”. He will remain on the company’s board of directors.
“The past two and a half years have been pivotal in the evolution and rapid growth of Mozilla,” said Kovacs. “I am very proud of our accomplishments as a team. In our mission to empower the next two billion Web users, we’ve made great advances in desktop and mobile and in our ability to lead at the pace of the market.
“With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a vote of confidence in the abilities of the leadership team.”
New Mozilla executive chair Mitchell Baker said in a statement Kovacs had helped strengthen the company in terms of mobile.
“In 2010 we knew that we would need to change many things in order to be effective in the mobile computing environment: our technology, our expertise, our worldview, our focus,” she said.
“Gary’s leadership during this period has helped us build on the strong foundation to make these changes, and to bring that strength into the mobile environment. Gary has reinvigorated our focus on working with commercial partners, a trait that was central in Mozilla’s early life but less so during the Firefox desktop era.”
Kovacs previously served as senior vice president of markets, solutions and products at Sybase, and also worked for Adobe, Macromedia and IBM.
