Firefox was created by, and planned, and executed by people on Netscape's dime at first then on the Mozilla Foundation's dime. There were a few really valuable

Firefox was created by, and planned, and executed by people on Netscape's dime at first then on the Mozilla Foundation's dime. There were a few really valuable volunteers that came later, PCH for example helped rewrite bookmarks before 1.0, but to suggest that Firefox just landed on Mozilla from "the community" is horse shit. Firefox was a considered bet by Mozilla's leadership team in the summer of 2002. I know this because I was on Mozilla's leadership team and in the meeting where it was decided. It took place at a table outside of Netscape's building 21 after Mitchell'd been laid off but while a few of us still worked there to manage the Mozilla project. The guy that started what would become Firefox, Ben Goodger (and who quickly abandoned it) was a Netscape employee. Like me, a couple years earlier he'd been hired by Netscape thanks to his Mozilla volunteering efforts. The guy that picked up the abandoned corpse and reanimated it was a Netscape intern named Blake Ross, a high school kid that I'd recruited into the Mozilla project as a volunteer. After Ben dropped it (perhaps to pursue Manticore, his .Net standalone browser project) Blake and I worked on it. Jason Kersey, another Mozilla volunteer that got a job at Netscape, contributed CSS and icons and gave us our first working theme I think (Remember mozillaZine? that was Jason, well, it was started by Chris Nelson, but Jason had mozBin, the place to go for binaries before Netscape/Mozilla provided them, well they joined forces for what most folks recall as mozillaZine's early years.) A few of us worked on "m/b" for a couple months, you could find progress updates at my blog, and as summer got into full swing, a couple other members of the leadership team and myself, at an outdoor table at Netscape, pitched the larger group on moving away from the integrated application suite to what would become Firefox and Thunderbird. There were a few good reasons, but chief among them, I believe, in convincing Brendan and Mitchell, was that a failure of one could not tank the other as with the integrated suite. If we had a crasher in MailNews, it took down the Browser, the whole suite crashed, ugly. They were tightly coupled and with AOL in shut-down mode with Netscape, and resourcing in doubt, that was a risk that standalone apps wouldn't have. Also, if you didn't need mail, you didn't have to take on that shared UI overhead. Two .exes were better than one. There were other arguments made, Dave Hyatt, who was in that meeting as well, I think, advocated for "XUL done right" a clean user interface implementation without the Netscape compromises that made Mozilla and Netscape slower than need be. Dave created XUL, he was one of the architects of the cross platform toolkit that Mozilla adopted when it moved to NGLayout (Gecko). Well, staff@mozilla was convinced and we began planning the transition. A couple months later I shipped the first public version, Phoenix 0.1. I may have a detail or two off here, but my point is I was there, an integral part of all of this, and Firefox was not "some community members" tossing something over a wall to a hapless Mozilla/Netscape. Firefox originated on Netscape's dime, by people Netscape harvested from the community, and Firefox's development up to v1.0, 95% of it anyway, was paid for by the Mozilla Foundation who employed Ben and Blake and me and others to take that prototype from a hobby project of a few Netscapers waiting for the axe, to a full product release with a strong and growing organization behind it. Surely most of you know, but for those who don't, Dave and much of his Netscape team went to Apple and did Safari on KHTML and Ben and several other Mozilla and Netscape folks went to Google and did Chrome. Firefox was founded in part by some of the founders of Safari and Chrome. We all worked closely together for 2 or 3 years in the end-times at Netscape, a few of us a bit longer. Were there volunteers that helped Firefox get to 1.0? Yes. For sure. Most of them were ex-Netcape(Mozilla) like Bryan Ryner, ex Netscaper who helped us go cross platform with Firefox. We had originally planned on Windows only with Camino on Mac and Galeon probably for Linux. Once we became the official Mozilla browser though we needed Mac and Linux support and bryner got those platforms standing up for us. We had two community contributed themes, before the Mozilla Foundation worked with artists and agencies to get a couple of professional themes. I mentioned Pierre Chanail's bookmkarks rewrite. In the end, Firefox was a Mozilla project through and through. It originated as a pet project at Netscape, not "from the community" as you've suggested, and Mozilla adopted it almost immediately. Before it even had a name, when Dave, Blake, Ben, and I just called it "m/b" for mozilla/browser the cvs repo where it lived, Mozilla's leadership team, a group that included Dave and myself, were advocating for adopting it as the official browser. As Netscape was imploding and we were creating the life boat Mozilla Foundation, the few remaining Netscape employees and a few laid off or moved on ex-Netscapers kept it alive with the Phoenix 0.x release (I managed almost all of those) until the Mozilla Foundation was created where we went through a couple of quick name changes and it finally became Firefox. BTW, I believe Jason gets credit for the name Firefox. Not 100% sure but we were all at the same whiteboard and that's my memory.