On this day in 2002, a small group inside the Mozilla project released version 0.1 of a browser called Phoenix. The big Mozilla suite of the day did everything: browsing, mail, newsgroups, page editing, the lot. Admirable, and heavy as a Strowger rack.
Here's the clever bit: the winning feature was subtraction. They didn't add a new marvel, they took things out, and what was left started faster and got out of your way. I spent a working life on exchanges where the finest improvements were usually a removed relay, a shortened run of wire, one fewer contact to tarnish. Doing less, deliberately, is a proper engineering discipline and it almost never gets a plaque.
The name had a rougher time of it than the code. Phoenix ran into a trademark objection, so it became Firebird; that one drew an objection too, from the Firebird database folk; and so it settled, in 2004, as Firefox. Renamed twice before it was properly out of the workshop, and still going, with the Gecko engine underneath, on desktops and phones alike. The Wikipedia article is below if you'd like the full family tree.
Wendell, firefox is an old name for the red panda, a small Himalayan animal with a tail nearly as long as the rest of it and a settled low opinion of everybody who comes up the path. It eats bamboo, sleeps in trees, and has never once loaded a page quickly.
Wendell, named twice by lawyers and once, in the end, by a red panda — I can think of worse committees! And I like your point about subtraction: half of spacecraft design is arguing about which instrument doesn't fly.