By December it was clear that a rename was going to be necessary. 🙂 The final nail in the coffin was an approach from the Phoenix BIOS people because of their Phoenix FirstView Connect product. It has been suggested that Dave Hyatt’s naming research was a little… perfunctory.) Amusingly enough, I have an email from shaver which says “It’s way, way late to be changing the name of our Phoenix”. which lived at at the time, and might have been the same as this one. (Chimera, which became Camino, was actually the name of an existing _browser_. Phoenix was the name of an open source Java Server framework and of a mail client. Our habit of choosing already-taken names for our products began around this time. Hixie wrote an extremely unapologetic FAQ on this point (which I’d like to find a copy of, but can’t at the moment), which led to me referring (perhaps unfairly) to their development process in an email to Brendan as “arrogant cathedral-style”. Checkin rights to their part of the tree were not available to anyone else, although patches would be considered. The original group as I remember it were: Dave Hyatt, Blake Ross, Pierre Chanial, Ian Hickson and Asa Dotzler. The start of Firefox (originally called mozilla/browser, then Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox) happened because various key hackers in Mozilla (some of whom were Netscape employees) were fed up of the control Netscape exercised over the Mozilla suite – particularly in terms of the UI, but also the design-by-committee kitchen-sink feature list. Or is it possible I was still on the suite and missed it? I think my brain must have deleted that theme from memory. 4 comments on “Milestone: Phoenix 0.1 released, first version of Firefox”

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