By the the mid-90s, however, it was pitted against Internet Explorer in the now infamous Browser Wars. Exponential growth would be an understatement. In a short time, Netscape grew to three quarters of the market. After that, Mozilla became the de facto name for the source code of the Netscape browser whenever it was referred to internally.

He had smashed “Mosaic” and “killer” together, mixed in Godzilla for good measure, and there it was: Mozilla. Jamie Zawkinski, a programmer that came with Andresson from NCSA, suggested a nickname in a staff meeting. For legal reasons, Mosaic was renamed to Netscape Navigator while still in beta.Īndresson made it clear to his team that Netscape’s new browser had to be a “Mosaic Killer”. The first release of the browser was called Netscape Mosaic, hoping to capitalize on existing users. In the end, not a single line of code from Mosaic remained. They had to reimagine everything, from the ground-up.

The newly formed company didn’t have a right to any of the code that their programmers wrote when they were at NCSA. This wasn’t just for the sake of improving the browser. Netscape’s browser was a complete rewrite of Mosaic. They left the company to start their own, taking a few top programmers from NCSA along with them.

In 1994, about a year after the initial release of Mosaic, they staged a coup of sorts. They wanted to test it’s commercial and enterprise possibilities and push the browser even further. Marc Andresson, a founder of the project, and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, had other ideas for Mosaic. It introduced breakthrough features like the img tag and inline multimedia, and was available on just about any operating system out there. The most popular of the early browsers was NCSA Mosaic. If you want to understand where Mozilla Firefox came from, you have to go back to just about the time the web was starting up. In fact, taking a look at these moments takes us on a parallel path through the history of the web itself. For me, the most intriguing way to take a look through Mozilla’s history is to track each time its name has changed. The rich history of Mozilla and Firefox is one that I imagine I’ll be coming back to from time to time. One of the web’s most influential browsers has roots that date back to its earliest days, and an evolution that has transformed it several times over.

Mozilla firefox logo history