In Pictures: B is for browser - a homage to 12 Web greats

In honor of Mosaic's 20th birthday, join us for an alphabetical appreciation of 12 of history's great windows on the Web.

F is for Firefox, which rose from Netscape's ashes It looked a little similar, but cut down on the crashes

Firefox can trace its roots to 1993's Mosaic -- and its name to a briefcase full of trademark disputes. The Mosaic-coders-turned-Netscape-founders chose Mozilla, which reportedly stood for Mosaic Killer, as the code-name for their Navigator browser. And when Netscape later launched an open-source browser project, it too was called Mozilla.

The group ran into trademark troubles when it tried to name its browser, first Phoenix and then Firebird. So Mozilla's 2004 release was called Firefox (shown here: v. 1.5 in 2005), and it rapidly gained favor as a stable, speedy and extendable browser that wasn't from a reviled monolithic company.

Except that after six or seven years, it wasn't so stable and speedy, and people flocked back to a monolithic company -- but this time it wasn't Microsoft.

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