What was the original name of the Mozilla Firefox browser?

The original name of the Mozilla Firefox browser was Phoenix.

Phoenix began in 2002 as a streamlined, standalone branch of the Mozilla project. Developers Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt, and Blake Ross wanted an alternative to the increasingly feature-heavy Mozilla Application Suite, which bundled browsing with email, news, and other tools.

The Phoenix name evoked the mythical bird rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator, whose browser had lost ground to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Phoenix Technologies objected to the name on trademark grounds, so Mozilla changed it to Firebird in 2003. That name then created confusion with the existing Firebird database project.

Mozilla finally adopted Firefox on February 9, 2004, ahead of the browser’s version 1.0 release on November 9 that year. Camino was a separate Mac browser, SeaMonkey became the successor to the Mozilla Application Suite, and Netscape was Firefox’s broader historical predecessor—not an earlier name for Firefox.