History
The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by
Dave Hyatt,
Joe Hewitt and
Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of
Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven
feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.To combat what they saw as the
Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, the
Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and
Thunderbird.
The Firefox project has undergone several name changes. Originally titled
Phoenix, it was renamed because of
trademark issues with
Phoenix Technologies. The replacement name,
Firebird, provoked an intense response from the
Firebird free database software project.
[20][21][22] In response, the Mozilla Foundation stated that the browser should always bear the name
Mozilla Firebird to avoid confusion with the database software. Continuing pressure from the database server's development community forced another change; on February 9, 2004, Mozilla Firebird became
Mozilla Firefox,
[23] often referred to as simply
Firefox.
Mozilla prefers that Firefox be abbreviated as
Fx or
fx, though it is often abbreviated as
FF.
[24] The Firefox project went through many versions before 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. After a series of stability and security fixes, the Mozilla Foundation released its first major update, Firefox version 1.5, on November 29, 2005. Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.12 is the final version officially supported under
Windows 95.