OK, Firefox fanbois (and fangrrls!), here’s a round serving of facts about the One True Browser to sate your appetite for all things Mozilla-derived!

Geek-elite Jamie Zawinski was the first to name Firefox’s predecessor, Mozilla, and he recounts many fun anecdotes from those days on his site, along with his own telling of the open-source release party hosted at the Mozilla site itself.

Type “about: mozilla” into Firefox’s address bar and you’ll get a quote from the parody-tome “The Book of Mozilla”. This still works even in the latest release. To clear up what some of these quotes mean, try this page. Still confused? Did you view the source?

When Debian and Firefox had their snit over completely free licensing of the Firefox brand name, Debian ended up using the Firefox source but changing the branding to “Iceweasel“. The name comes from ice being opposed to fire, weasel being a characteristically cowardly creature as opposed to a strong and crafty fox, and the quote from Simpsons creator Matt Groening: “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”

Firefox is actually one of the few open-source programs to be released under a triple-license: the Mozilla Public License, GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. They added the second two GPLs due to concern about integrating Firefox with GNU-based systems. In other words, to make Richard Stallman happy.

You might have noticed that complaints about Firefox’s memory usage have diminished recently. That was after PC World tested Firefox 2 against Internet Explorer 7 and found that Firefox used less memory - with three tabs open in each, IE7 used 80MB while FF2 used 58MB.

The Firefox 2 series still doesn’t pass the ACID2 test for perfect rendering, at least as far as public releases go. However, the release of Firefox 3 is expected to pass it, since it will be the first to utilize the Gecko 1.9 layout engine. For the curious, so far the only public builds of web browsers to have passed ACID2 are Safari, Konqueror, Prince, Shiira, Opera, and iCab.

You’ve used the web browser, but have you seen the Firefox movie or played the Firefox video game? Well, they’re out there! As discovered over at Penguin Pete’s blog. And the movie was based on a spy-thriller novel by Craig Thomas, who also wrote a sequel.

According to this article on Tech Republic, Firefox went through several name changes. It was originally Raptor (after the Mozilla dinosaur), then Phoenix (the mythical bird rising from its father’s ashes, a reference to being derived from Netscape), then Firebird (makes sense if you’ve seen a phoenix). A red panda was also considered for the mascot animal.

Related Posts:

• Understanding the Open Source Licenses
• Five Web Browsers You Probably Haven’t Tried
• A Brief History of Web Browsers
• What Your Web-Browser Says About You - part 2
• A Guide to Linux Package Systems

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