The Saga Continues
An open-source relational database project in existence at the time bore the Firebird label as well. After initial resistance from Mozilla, the database's development community eventually applied enough pressure to prompt yet another name change for the browser. For the second and final time, the browser's name was officially changed from Firebird to Firefox in February of 2004.
Mozilla, seemingly frustrated and embarrassed about the naming issues, released this statement after the change was made: "We've learned a lot about choosing names in the past year (more than we would have liked to). We have been very careful in researching the name to ensure that we will not have any problems down the road. We have begun the process of registering our new trademark with the US Patent and Trademark office."
With the final alias in place, Firefox 0.8 was introduced on February 9, 2004 containing the new name and new look. In addition, it contained the offline browsing feature as well as a Windows installer which replaced the previous .zip delivery method. Over the next several months intermediate versions were released to address some remaining defects and security glitches as well as to introduce features such as the ability to import Favorites and other settings from Internet Explorer.
In September, the first public release version was made available, Firefox PR 0.10. Several search engine choices were added to the search bar, including eBay and Amazon. Among other features, the RSS capability in Bookmarks made its debut.
Millionaires
It took only five days after the public release for Firefox to pass the one million download mark, exceeding expectations and beating Mozilla's self-imposed 10-day goal to hit the coveted mark.
