The Firefox project was started as an experiment under the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. According to them, the creeping featurism and commercial aspects of Netscape’s sponsorship resulted in unsatisfactory performance of the Mozilla browser. They believed that the Mozilla suite was full of bloatware or newer, larger software with no significant benefits over the older versions. Their emphasis was on creating a better browser to replace the Mozilla Suite. Consequently, the Mozilla Organization announced a shift in focus to Firefox and Thunderbird from the previous pivotal product, Mozilla Suite on April 3, 2003.
Starting with the name Phoenix, the Firefox project has been assigned several names. After facing trademark problems with Phoenix Technologies, the Firefox project was renamed as Firebird. This title was challenged by the Firebird free database software project as it resulted in confusion between the two separate projects. On February 9, 2004, the Mozilla Foundation finally settled on the name Mozilla Firefox for the new browser.
By the time version 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004, the Firefox project had already gone through many versions of the browser. The first key update was released as Firefox 1.5 on November 29, 2005 followed by Firefox 2 on October 24, 2006. This included updates in security and stability features with version 1.5 and updated GUI, search, tabbed browsing settings, spell check, extension manager, new session restore feature and anti-phishing techniques with version 2. The anti-phishing feature was adopted by Google as an extension and eventually, went on to merge into the program itself.
