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Some history about Firefox and BeOS. Before Firefox, there was Mozilla, which had a BeOS port (called Bezilla). Bezilla was bloated and slow. So the BeOS community tried to make a stripped version of Mozilla with only the browser (minus all the bloat). This project became an inspiration to do the same for Mozilla, and that product became Firebug (or something similar - edit phoenix, then firebird), which due to trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today. So in a round-a-bout way, we have come full circle after 20 years, Firefox is finally ported to the platform that inspired its creation.

Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.

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It wasn't Firebug, that was a developer tool extension. It was first Phoenix which hit trademark issues, and then Firebird which hit trademark issues, which then became Firefox.

From what I remember, Firebird was more related to the database open source project which was a fork of InterBase, so at that time it was relatively well known due to its roots with IB.

Maybe it hit trademark issues, but the reason I remember from slashdot was that phoenix was already a semi-popular open source project in the debian repository, so firefox had to be named from phoenix to mozilla-phoenix. But firefox at the time still named phoenix just ran so much better on windows than linux, it was funny.

Both Phoenix and Firebird were over the naming and trademark clashes:

For firebird, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-holds-fire-i... and https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozillas-fir... in this case it was AOL Time Warner that owned the Firebird trademark for the database.

2) For Phoenix, https://web.archive.org/web/20070914035447/http://www.ibphoe... the main reporting on it seems to be lost but wikipedia still backs it up

Phoenix was because of a challenge from Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker. Firefox was because of concerns about stomping on a small OSS project, the Firebird Database. I was responsible for all of this at Mozilla. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for clarifying! FWIW, I wasn't there, but that matches exactly what I remember from that time (I did follow all the different renamings in detail).

No.

Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name.

We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again.

I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

was waterduck considered?

Stormcow

Tornadocalf

Technically, all real-life ducks are waterducks. Except when they're temporarily airducks.

Did you also come up with Sharknado in this whiteboarding exercise?

You had me at “BIOS web browser”

I'm assuming some kind of instant-on OS feature

which if you're interested—Cathode Ray Dude on youtube has several episode series all about that weird and wonderful point of computer history

I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...

> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.

Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.

It was Firebird. Thanks for correcting me.

With a fraction of the userbase it had 20 years ago, thanks to everyone that keeps shipping Chrome with their applications, testing only with Chrome developer tools, and so on.

Anyway, congratulations to anyone involved in the port.

Wouldn't 20 years ago have less people using Mozilla/Firefox since everyone was still using IE6? I remember around that time i was still encountering several (public, not internal) sites that refused to work with anything that wasn't IE6.

I think at least nowadays people try to pretend they care about web standards.

There were some sites requiring IE6 but not that many, and the improvements like tabs were enough for people switch to Firefox where they could.

Unfortunately Mozilla’s refusal to implement process-per-tab, combined with Flash’s instability, let Chrome eat their lunch.

chrome eat their lunch for only one reason: everytime you were doing a google search, google literally begged people to download their browser while half of the smartphone were coming with google chrome by default.

In the head of people google and chrome slowly became a synonym of internet the same way the ie icon used to be in the previous decade.

Beware of simplistic reasoning.

What you mention was certainly a major reason, but not the only one. Another one was that Chrome was simply a better browser for many years for normal users (mainly because of its performance).

Yeah, a lot of people switched for its performance. For a while, it was the bringing you the efforts of both Apple and Google to improve the rendering. Couldn't be beat.

Also, Google paid a ton of money to bundle the Chrome installer with Flash and Adobe Acrobat downloads.

They're doing that now (and for the last several years). I don't remember them doing that back when Chrome overtook Firefox in 2012, though...

Well, that hegemony happened by the end of the Netscape days, which prompted the infamous United States v. Microsoft Corp. case.

We're getting the United States v. Google case so hopefully history doesn't repeat.

I actually hope that history does repeat itself, and google gets severely punished

If history does repeat itself, the punishment wont be very large, despite guilty judgment. Microsoft was found to have engaged in monopolistic practices, but was still given a relative slap on the wrist instead of outright broken up.

And Firefox got to where it was at its peak by being better than IE, not because of any pressure from political institutions. I think there are many parallel universes where Microsoft does in fact own the web.

Microsoft did not get severely punished for bundling the IE.

Google was force feeding Chrome to everyone at google.com.

Well, it would appear that Google will be forced to stop paying companies to make Google the default search. This is actually kind of a death for Mozilla as that’s where most of their money comes from.

A death of Mozilla could be just what is needed for a rebirth of Firefox.

As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla browsers.

Yeah. We were all sick of loading a website with Internet Explorer and getting 1930201 hot toolbars, blinking 'desktop buddies' and 32 new system tray icons with programs running.

Phoenix saved us.

Konqueror says hello. I’m only half kidding, it was actually somewhat capable and I used it a lot. For those who don’t know, its legacy was khtml, famously forked into WebKit and Blink.

I cannot remember a moment when Konqueror felt good enough for me as a daily driver, but it was impressive anyways.

From a community perspective, it would have been a great thing to push it forward further, spend resources on it, and have at least one web browser that isn't somewhat wicked.

Admittedly, back then, we all hoped that Firefox would be that 'friendly' browser, and it probably truly was at that time.

Time has changed. Now I'm forced to like a browser that is always just slightly less evil than a one that would even IE look friendly. And with every version we are now waiting when they also will drop the manifest v2 support for dubious reasons. And even if that will never happen, they will continue to find other ways to disappoint me.

Yes, khtml was at least a nice time to remember. :)

PS: My personal feeling is that "impressive but not good enough as a daily driver" was and is true for some more KDE apps. This is why I use Plasma Desktop, but barely any more of their apps than Dolphin and maybe kate to some degree. I know all you're going to say now about free software and how it works and so on, and you're right, but technically, it would be sooo much better if just half of the email client projects (or office suites, IDEs, photo editing, ...; you name it) would exist, but with more developer powers behind it. But I'm digressing......

Hey, me too, back in the day. Konqueror's ui was much nicer than the alternatives. Especially the ability to open multiple panes in the same window - made browsing slashdot easier.

Shame it hasn't kept up.

At the turn of the century, Mozilla are trying to ship a web browser (also to be called Mozilla) based on the work they've got from Netscape. They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone) releases, which preview what we today think about as normal dynamic HTML but at the time it commonly just crashes the entire browser.

Like, a colleague was working on code that would reach into the DOM and just tweak the CSS for a bunch of items, delete other items, move things around, and maybe 40% of the time it would work as intended, and 60% of the time, boom, dead browser, segmentation fault.

React, where it's just normal for Javascript to rewrite the entire page in response to a keystroke, would have been completely unthinkable, there's no chance you could fill out an entire form before the browser crashed if you do that.

React only became possible due to JavaScript JITs being made available, almost a decade later.

We are talking about V8 being released in 2008, Chackra in 2011, and SpiderMonkey in 2009.

With GCs that can handle the amount of stuff that React throws away on each update.

> They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone) releases

Relevant: “A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox” https://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html

Sadly I now see sites refusing to work unless you use Chrome even though there is no technical reason whatsoever why it should break under other standards-complaint browsers. I've seen all sort of tricks to detect non-Chrome-usage and the result is anything from a snarky message advising you to use Chrome (sometimes a very specific version and OS is specified as well!) at best or a blank page at worst. And yes every time I've seen this, it's happened on public facing sites -- I'm lucky that at $WORKPLACE we are a Microsoft shop, and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines (with the possible exception of Teams but I reluctantly use the Electron app for that). Chrome has become the modern day IE. The mainstream population just haven't realized that yet to be fair, but this will become clear in the years to come and the next generation will wonder how the heck both IE and later Chrome become dominant.

> and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines

I don't know why that's ironic. The Microsoft web teams have always had a focus on being fairly standards compliant. The Microsoft Browser team themselves definitely went down a route of stagnation with IE6, but a lot of that had to do with W3C's stagnation as much as Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior. They also implemented massively useful technologies that are ubiquitous today, such as XHR.

They get a bad rap, for deserved reasons, but that decade of stagnation and non-Standard ActiveX controls wasn't fully on them.

I wonder how true that is in absolute numbers, given how many more people are online (/exist) now.

According to Mozilla's own numbers, Firefox Monthly Active Users have been trending down for years and are currently sitting at around 155 million.

Source: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

If you switch from 'Worldwide' to 'United States' Firefox has shed 1/3 of its MAU in the last 5 years, much worse then I thought.

Sounds like a good reason to up the CEO's pay by another million for these accomplishments.

Ah right, forgot that I can just check that in the open reports :)

Not really accurate. I was there.

Native front ends like Galeon on Linux and Chimera/Camino on Mac inspired Firefox (m/b->Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox, my bad that naming mess was also my fault, see Chimera->Camino for more of my handy work with AOL lawyers right before Netscape shuttered and we got our independence with MoFo.)

We kept XUL because Dave made it great on Windows so no native front end but that let us preserve extensions and re-used a few key widgets in XPToolkit easily.

Bezilla was just another Mozilla suite port, one of about a dozen at the time, one that never got any core Mozilla team attention except as a niche port we were happy to host, so suggesting it was inspiration for what Blake and I did to get Firefox going (and later Ben, Dave and Joe and others) is a bit off-track.

I guess Firebug was the original "developer tools": https://getfirebug.com/

It was an amazing revolution that made complex app development of JS based front ends finally tolerable.

IE already had debugging tools, however they had to be installed either via Visual Studio or Office Developer Tools.

Also they barely worked for anything non trivial, let alone what we now call SPAs

It flat-out made training people on CSS tolerable. I could have them install the Bookmarklet (before it became an Extension), show them how to use it, and boom, instant productivity boost. Being able to dig through the DOM and figure out what element was applying excessive margin or padding reduced 80% of my "heeeelp!" requests.

Within months I couldn't imagine working without it.

Firebug was amazing and one of the reasons I started doing front-end development again, after swearing it off because IE 5.x made it such a frustrating experience.

> Some history about Firefox and BeOS. Before Firefox, there was Mozilla, which had a BeOS port (called Bezilla). Bezilla was bloated and slow. So the BeOS community tried to make a stripped version of Mozilla with only the browser (minus all the bloat). This project became an inspiration to do the same for Mozilla...

I see no mention of that on the Firefox Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History.

From ash to famed flame

wings then fox feet now return

whence they were kindled

Around that time, and probably for that reason, Opera was ported to BeOS.

https://www.wired.com/1998/08/opera-browses-beos/

> which due to trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today.

There wasn't a trademark issue, the Mozilla team opted to change the name out of respect for the other OSS project (Firebird SQL).

Mozilla

Through BeOS becomes

Firefox

A tale like that?

It might be very useful

But now it is gone

Galeon and Kazekahase existed too.

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