Way back in the day, there was a solid open source web browser called Mozilla. Mozilla was great — it was the alternative to Internet Explorer, and it rendered pages fast. It had some neat features that Internet Explorer just couldn’t match: tabbed browsing, for example. It had a lot of other features as well: an email client, IRC, HTML editor, etc. For a while, Mozilla was king.

Mozilla might have made it to version 1.6 or so, but some developers began to long for a browser that could take the best features of Mozilla, and cut out all the excess: the email client, IRC client — anything that wasn’t used for just browsing the web. They began coding, and came up with Phoenix. Phoenix essentially took the rendering engine from Mozilla, put it in a window, and added a location bar. The goal, as they stated, was to have a browser that loaded fast (both for web pages and from a cold start) and that didn’t have a large memory footprint, something that Mozilla couldn’t get around.

screenshot of phoenix

It got mixed reactions. Mozilla die-hards couldn’t see the point in a browser that didn’t have all the amenities that Mozilla offered — session support, better bookmarks handling, etc. Others said that they sometimes used Phoenix for “spur of the moment” browsing, but for their regular routine still used Mozilla. The criticism spurned a feature that got added early on: extensions. Extensions were the perfect solution to the complaints voiced by many. People who wanted the bare-bones, lightning-fast browser would get what they wanted. And people who needed more meat in their browser could get that too, with all the lag and program heft that came with that.

It was about this time that the Mozilla foundation decided to take the old email functionality from Mozilla, which was cut from Phoenix, and package it as a new email client. They of course put a lot of work into it, and set a standard for email clients. This software was called Thunderbird. But now Phoenix got a name change, and became Firebird. The new offering from Mozilla was the powerful combo of Firebird/Thunderbird, and it was slick. Breaking up the functionality allowed each piece to be faster and better at what it did, and the two programs got more popular every day.

Unfortunately the name “Firebird” got Mozilla into a bit of a bind — it was already trademarked, and they were forced to change the name. A lot of ideas were thrown around, and when the dust settled Firebird became Firefox, the name it still holds today. Pretty soon thereafter, Firefox hit 1.0.

firefox 1.0 screenshot

There was a trend leading up to this point, and continuing thereafter, that I’m not sure if other people noticed or cared about: essentially, Firefox is becoming more and more like the Mozilla suite that it was designed to eschew. Firefox today is a hulking behemoth compared to the lean browser it was when it was still Phoenix. Extensions, designed to be easily installable, but optional, have become standard features. Maybe it was just inevitable, but I’d like to think that more decisive leadership could have kept the growth of Phoenix into Firefox more a matter of stability and standards support rather than feature bloat.

Firefox has, like Mozilla before it, become the swiss army knife of web browsing. Extensions allow Firefox to be taken in any direction. This would be fine as long as users that don’t want the fluff aren’t burdened with the same long load times and poor responsiveness that users with tons of extensions have.