Former product names

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Firefox, Thunderbird, and Camino all started out with different names. See Summary of Mozilla products for an overview of each product.

Firefox

Firefox was loosely based on the browser component of the Mozilla Suite. Originally called Phoenix, it had to change its name in due to trademark issues, and after many suggestions the Firebird name was chosen in 2003. However, there existed an open-source database called Firebird, and so to avoid confusion the the browser was renamed Firefox in 2004.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird was loosely based on the mail component of the Mozilla Suite. Originally called Minotaur, it was renamed in 2003 to coincide with the renaming of Phoenix to Firebird (now Firefox). It was felt that this would give fresh impetus to the project.

Camino

Camino is a Web browser optimized for MacOS X. Originally called Chimera, it was renamed in 2003 for legal reasons.

Mozilla Suite

The Mozilla Suite was the original Mozilla product consisting of a Web browser (usually just called “Mozilla”), an e-mail and newsgroup reader (Messenger), an HTML authoring tool (Composer), a contact manager (Address Book), and an IRC chat client (Chatzilla). In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation announced that they would not release any further official versions of the Suite beyond 1.7.x, since they intended to focus on the standalone applications Firefox and Thunderbird. Further developments of the Mozilla Suite are produced by a group of volunteers and are released under the name SeaMonkey (after the longstanding code name for the Suite).