Before it was called Firefox, or Firebird, Mozilla’s lightweight browser was known as Phoenix. An appropriate name, given than it rose from the ashes of Netscape. Read/WriteWeb has a nice retrospective pegged to the fourth anniversary of the creation of the Mozilla Foundation. It quotes me writing upon the demise of Netscape, and I thought it was useful to also mention the circle of web life that the Mozilla/Netscape browsers have been part of.

If you weren’t reading blogs back then, or missed the posts, some interesting related reading is John Rhodes’ seminal essay about a Google client from 2001, as well as Jason Kottke’s two posts from 2004.

As Richard says in his R/WW post, “Life is all about cycles though, so whether the Google/Mozilla romance turns out to be comedy or tragedy in 4 more years time — that is the question.”