Mosaic-Killer
I just stumbled across this list of company name etymologies on Wikipedia and noticed that Mozilla is also on there. It reads:
from the name of the web browser that preceded Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla) by Jamie Zawinski.
Mozilla, the Mosaic-Killer. Funny. (Even though I can’t quite say much about the historical accuracy, of course).
(via kottke)
You forgot to mention one interesting detail: Mosaic has been bought by Microsoft and became the base for Internet Explorer. About Internet Explorer dialog still says: “Based on NCSA Mosaic”
See http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html for how the Mozilla name was created. Just search for the first occurrence of “Mozilla” on that page.
Wladimir: It’s more complicated than that. The NCSA licensed the Mosaic technology and trademarks to Spyglass, who wrote Spyglass Mosaic from scratch (contrary to popular belief, they didn’t use any NCSA code). Spyglass then licensed their browser to Microsoft, who used it as the basis for Internet Explorer.
The “Based on NCSA Mosaic” phrasing is therefore a little inaccurate (“Based on Spyglass Mosaic” would be better) and down to this complex licensing arrangement.
In any case, there’s probably very little (if any) Spyglass code left in IE and the “Based on NCSA Mosaic” small print is gone in IE7.
This is interesting: http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html
The original Netscape code may well have had more in common with NCSA Mosaic than IE, given that the original Netscape team was made up of many ex-NCSA developers.
And there’s still pre-1998 Netscape code in Mozilla today… (NSPR and NSS spring to mind.)