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Comment by tingley | Hacker News Reader

This omits one of the most interesting parts of the story, which is how Firefox evolved as an offshoot from Mozilla in the first place.

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Yep, very good point. Inserted a paragraph about it on page five ("Firefox 1.0") - thanks :)

Might also check page 2 where it says, "...focus on two of the tools that made up the Mozilla Suite: Firefox and Thunderbird."

Neither Fx nor Tb were part of the app suite--they were both offshoots that, at the time, really violated what the project was aiming for. The story of how Firefox came to be and roguish it was seen within the organization at the time is interesting.

Yea, I actually played with that sentence a few times. I thought about making it clear that Firefox and Thunderbird weren't called Firefox and Thunderbird when they were part of Mozilla Suite... but the codebases are the same, I think. Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line, to keep things clear :)

Nice addition, although as a marginal Mozilla contributor at the time (and frequent IRC lurker), I remember a few other principals being involved -- notably Ben Goodger and and Matthew "mpt" Thomas, who seemed to me to be Blake Ross's primary co-conspirators. For a while it was just this skunkworks project called "m/b" (for "mozilla/browser", I believe), and there was a lot of implied frustration/drama related to AOL/NS-internal development process (the pinnacle of which was the doomed Netscape 6.)

I would love to read a real oral history of Firefox someday.

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