[peterwwillis]

I'm sorry but you're incorrect. Mozilla's Firefox was originally called Phoenix, and it was created because Mozilla the browser was a dog-slow encumbered monstrosity of Netscape's attempt to create an all-in-one solution for the web. Firefox was essentially competing with Mozilla Suite, but it wasn't so much "competing" as filling a necessary role: a browser that didn't suck.

Mozilla Suite was also not created to compete with Internet Explorer. In fact, Internet Explorer was created to compete with Netscape, which was the dominant browser for years until IE finally knocked it off its catbird seat. It never recovered because IE offered a simple, fast browsing experience, even if it sucked dick at actually rendering content.

In this vein, Phoenix was created in the model of Internet Explorer. So in a way you could say it competed, but in actual fact it was competing against its own progenitor.

Reflecting more on 'competition': the browser wars nearly destroyed the web as we know it as each browser introduced incompatible proprietary extensions which were then picked up (badly) by each other over time. The lack of standards, or good implementations of standards, severely hampered the adoption of more advanced technology. Firefox continues that tradition today by pushing more and more features that IE can't support; we're just lucky that Firefox is the dominant browser now, and that people are now used to upgrading their browser virtually every week.

[72deluxe]

It always makes me chuckle that Firefox adds more and more features and becomes more and more like the suite they replaced; I still miss the Composer for web pages!

I remember using it when it was called Firebird.

[nsmartt]

Huh. I was basing my comment on the knowledge that Mozilla feared IE would become the way to browse the web. I should have double checked.