Firefox: The alternative history

The newly formed Mozilla Foundation decided to focus more on standalone projects, such as the Firefox browser (then called Phoenix) and the Thunderbird mail client (then called Minotaur), rather than on the Mozilla Suite, which integrated all this functionality, Dotzler says. The decision was taken to make it easier to maintain the project and create a browser that appealed to IE users.

"By that point Phoenix was starting to get some buzz," he says. "We thought the smart move might be to break it [Mozilla Suite] up as if we didn't have the resources to maintain one of them, the whole thing would break."

"Also, by the time we time got to Mozilla 1.0, most of the audience had gone — there were very few people still using [Netscape] Communicator. We had taken on a lot of additional features — it was a heavyweight suite of applications and was weighed down by features such as the chat client. It was difficult for users of other products like [Microsoft] Outlook or IE to use."

Although within a few weeks, the browser was "twice as fast and half the size", some people were unhappy that the Foundation was focussing its attention on the standalone browser.

"In the early days there were a lot of people who thought this was a step backwards. But Blake [Ross, the creator of Firefox] and I were saying we need to make browser that doesn't target the current users — the biggest audience is IE users and they don't need an HTML authoring tool or an email client. Lets just give them a better browser with pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing," he says.

Some of the changes in the Firefox browser were minor, such as keyboard shortcuts. For example, in IE the shortcut, Alt+D, is used to select the address location bar, while the same feature required the shortcut, Ctrl+L, in Firefox. Firefox developers changed this so both shortcut keys worked, making the transition to Firefox easier for IE users.

"That little thing was a barrier to entry. Once we changed it IE users were willing to play with it for a few days because it felt more comfortable," says Dotzler.

April 2003: Mozilla Foundation changes name of Phoenix browser to Firebird due to trademark issues.

February 2004: Mozilla Foundation changes name of Firebird to Firefox, due to a trademark dispute with another open source project.

September 2004: Firefox 1.0 PR is made available. Around the same time the SpreadFirefox community marketing site launches, which helps the Mozilla Foundation beat its 10-day goal of one million Firefox downloads.

Before the Firefox release Dotzler and Ross started thinking about how to market the product. Initially, the main media coverage they got was through blogs, but this soon spread to the technology press. They decided to try to get the owners of blogs more involved in spreading Firefox.

"We spent one day looking at blogs and anyone who said something good about Firefox was asked to put a [Firefox promotional] button on their blog. Out of about 100 people, the overwhelming majority agreed. We thought, instead of going to blogs, lets post a list of blogs and ask the community to read them and if they're positive pass on the contact details [to us]. We then wrote to the blog owners — we thought it would sound better coming from the project leadership.".