Why is Firefox called Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Firefox called Firefox?

lunduke.locals.com

17 pointsgulced21 comments

My memory there is a bit fuzzy, but saying there was no official Mozilla web browser feels misleading. The Mozilla Suite (which I used for a while even in the 'milestone' versions) contained a fully functional web browser, Navigator - it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff. Very 'kitchen sink', inspired by the Netscape 'SeaMonkey' suite (SeaMonkey I believe lives on under that name). It wasn't based on the OG Netscape source code very much at all - while an attempt was made to develop that, it was so bad it was basically thrown in the bin and rewritten from scratch - which is where Gecko comes from.

K-Meleon and so forth was an attempt to take the core Gecko components out of the Mozilla Suite and just have a small simple browser built in it. Having seen that and a few others which had the same kind of idea but were native, Phoenix, which became Firebird, which became Firefox, was... kind of a grassroots disruptive community effort to try the same sort of minimum-viable-product browser thing in XPCOM as a cross-platform experiment, which rapidly gained adoption when people started realising how much faster and better it was to build it that way from the ground up instead. It certainly didn't feel like it was "AOL Time Warner" sponsored. If anything, it felt kind of chaotic. Nobody did a detailed name search because it was an experimental side project.

That worked so well, Thunderbird the email client was forked off too (during the Firebird era), and if I recall Sunbird (the calendar part)?

Yeah, this matches my recollection of that time period as well. I definitely used the browser here and there when it was still Phoenix. My memory even says that Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was something of a skunkworks project inside Mozilla, and it wasn't until several releases were made that Mozilla decided to go all-in on it and abandon their other browser. But those are nearly 25 year old memories so maybe they're incorrect.

This is a relatively accurate recollection. Each of the components of Seamonkey (which was the successor to Netscape, containing Navigator, Communicator, and others as you mentioned) was eventually rolled into a separate standalone project, some of which were part of the overall Mozilla Project and some which were done by the community outside of Mozilla. The IRC client even got spun out as ChatZilla as a standalone piece of software, as did the webpage editor/publisher (analogous to MS Front Page).

> it was just really heavy and cumbersome because it also had the mail client Communicator and the other stuff like the IRC client and it was very new, very raw, rough-edges software built on this new XPCOM stuff

The suite - Seamonkey - was/is heavy if all you used was the browser. If you compare it to running Firefox and Thunderbird together it actually was quite a bit leaner which is why I ran it for several years on lower-spec hardware.

Wasn't firebird some sort of calendar app?

As someone who was heavily involved in the project at the time that this was all going on, the narrative in this blog post is not remotely accurate. Not only is the narrative around bullying patently false, but this post doesn't even answer the question in the title. One of the founding members of the Mozilla Project, Asa Dotzler, recently posted publicly on LinkedIn reminiscing about how the name was chosen[1]. Straight from the horses mouth, they wanted a name that matched up to the email client ThunderBird, so they were testing different element and animal name combinations, which is how Firefox was arrived at. The name Firebird continued to be used internally as a project codename until the 1.0 release, as noted by Chris Blizzard in the interview with MozillaZine. Project codenames are generally not intended to be the final product name, and in this case when Firefox went 1.0 it was named Firefox and the trademark was already registered in the US.

There's plenty of valid criticisms that could be levied around the choice of names... after all one of the hardest things in computer science is naming things, but everyone involved in the early days of Mozilla were decent people who just wanted to use software to improve the web and the world, there was definitely no malice behind anyone's actions. I'm not sure who the author of this post is, but is seems like they're employing motivated reasoning layered on top of hindsight without any empathy towards the people actually involved. That's setting aside the fact that the narrative is not true, and is borderline a bald-faced lie.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7181470...

> the narrative in this blog post is not remotely accurate.

Lunduke is politically charged against Mozilla. Don't expect accuracy there.

https://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article2278.html

> June 5, 2002 - Mozilla.org, the organization that coordinates Mozilla open-source development and provides services to assist the Mozilla community, today announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, the first major-version public release of the Mozilla software. A full-fledged browser suite...

IIRC one of Mozilla's v1 killer features was "tabs" in a time when opening links in a new window was the only (mainstream) option for a meandering web junkie.

Trademark games are pretty common in consumer tech. FaceTime and iOS are high profile examples of names ("marks" in parlance) that ended up licensed / transferred.

> And, over the few years that followed (funded by AOL Time Warner), several web browsers were created which used that core Mozilla code. Web browsers that, for the most part, have long been forgotten.

> Web Browsers such as Galeon, K-Meleon, QBAT.i, and SkipStone. Many browsers, for many platforms… all built using the core Mozilla web rendering engine. Yet there was no official “Mozilla” web browser.

This isn't true, right? After it took code from Netscape, Mozilla continued to ship browser called Mozilla Navigator, well before Firefox was concieved.

That arrogant Lunduke guy has a strange definition of a bully.

It's weird his pivot to "hot takes" guy.

Yes, your collective memories are correct. Mozilla had a web browser before Firefox. It was part of the Mozilla Suite which itself was the open sourced version of Netscape Navigator. It contained "Navigator (a Web browser), Communicator (Mozilla Mail & Newsgroups), a Web page developer (Mozilla Composer), an IRC client (ChatZilla) and an electronic address book."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite

I made fun splash screens for it back in the day:

- https://johnhaller.com/useful-stuff/splash-screens-for-mozil...

After Firefox and Thunderbird were launched as individual apps, the Mozilla Suite became SeaMonkey, which is still maintained by a community of volunteer developers.

I think at some point in the early I had an extension (not sure if that is the right terminology) which would randomly change the name of Firefox to [random adjective] [random animal].

It was 'firebird 0.1' but there is already firebird thing. So changed name to firefox.

It was Phoenix first, rebranded to Firebird to avoid confusion with umpteen other existing projects with the same name - including a browser. Unfortunately there was also an existing Firebird (database), so they rebranded again to Firefox.

And of course, back then there was also Camino/Chimera as the OSX version

You almost got it. Not quite.

And for Debian users, there was a period where Firefox was called Iceweasel. Also because of trademark rules and Mozilla being a bit obnoxious, because they didn't want to allow Debian to apply their own security patches to Firefox and still call it Firefox.

This is such a bad article... The guy took a few pieces of history and set his narrative around it completely distorting the actual course of events.

Why is Thunderbird called Thunderbird?

Because at the time, the three "official" projects had inter-related codenames. The browser component came first and the name change from Phoenix to Firebird had already happened, then email and calendaring were started which became Thunderbird and Sunbird respectively. The name generation scheme that they settled on was element + animal, and is the same reason they ultimately chose the name Firefox (element + animal).

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