Firefox's unusually eye-catching name. In fact, Firefox has gone by three names throughout its short lifetime. When we started work on the Firefox project in 2002, we called it Phoenix after the mythical bird that is reborn from its own ashes. This was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that the product was being reborn out of the ashes of Netscape, the very first Web browser. Because Firefox is based on much of the same underlying code as Netscape, this was an apt metaphor. It was also a playful jab at a company that, we felt, had stopped adequately serving its customers, and desperately needed to be reborn. Unfortunately, we were a very small - and very broke - team in those days, and we didn't have the money or the wherewithal to do any sort of legal inquiry into the name. As Phoenix grew more popular, we were contacted by a company who claimed ownership of the trademark. To avoid legal problems, we changed the name to Firebird, a synonym for Phoenix that evokes the same imagery. Of course, we still didn't have any money, and we just wanted to get back to work on the browser. So we didn't bother inquiring about this name, either. We soon learned that a database project was already using the name Firebird, and the encroachment was even worse this time, because the project was open source and community-developed - just like Firefox. Oops. Because Firebird had grown fairly popular by this point, we wanted to keep the Fire moniker for continued name recognition, and spent about three months just bouncing ideas off each other: Fireblast? Fireworks? Firefox? Firesoup? Bingo! Firesoup it was. No, just kidding. We did, of course, pick Firefox, and this time we made sure we had rights to the name. Contrary to popular belief, a Firefox is actually not a fox - it's a Chinese red panda, as shown in the figure. Of course, our community wasn't going to let us off the hook so easily - especially after we poked fun at Netscape with our first two names. Soon after this final name change, a volunteer created an extension called Firesomething that randomly assigns a new name to Firefox each time you start - like Firecat or, yes, even Fireblake. What goes around comes around.   "I can never find what I'm looking for." And who can blame you? There are over 12 billion pages on the Web. The Search Box in the upper-right corner gives you direct access to a handful of top search engines from wherever you are (see Figure 1-3) and allows you to add engines to that list (see Chapter 4). When you find a relevant page, use the Find Bar to drill down even further (see Figure 1-4). Chapter 4 outlines how Firefox helps you find what you're looking for. Figure 1-3: Search for anything from anywhere by using the Search Box in the corner of Firefox. Figure 1-4: Firefox's revolutionary Find Bar automatically finds text on a page as you type. "The Internet is a scary place." Every day, the media warns you about rampant identity theft, yet the world's most-used browser - Internet Explorer - has the worst security track record of any product. Firefox was built with your security in mind and forbids the technologies that make Internet Explorer so exploitable. Hundreds of thousands