As any respectable application, Firefox has a recognizable look, at least an out of the box look. It’s the one you are looking for and finding more and more in TV reports and newspaper screenshots.

But, Firefox not always looked the way it does. It was not even called that way about four years ago when it started. Let’s see.

It’s September 23, 2002, and Phoenix 0.1 looks like this

The theme is called Orbit and believe it or not it’s still available , though not exactly the same, as the Orbit 3+1 theme, available at addons.mozilla.org. Notice there is no search bar but toolbar customization is alredy there.

Fast forward to May 14, 2003. Phoenix name is dropped for Firebird starting one of the hottest discussions between open source communities because Firebird is also the name of an open source database project. Anyways, three days later, a Firefox update is released as Firebird 0.6. The new version also features a new theme, Qute, developed by Arvid Axelsson.

The Qute theme is still maintained by Arvid Axelsson himself and available from addons.mozilla.org.

For peace sake the Mozilla Foundation drops the name on February 9, 2004. The new release becomes Firefox 0.8.

Due to unclarified license disagreements, Qute is dropped for Firefox 0.9 and replaced with what is now known as Winstripe Classic created by Kevin Garrich and Stephen Horlander from the Mozilla Visual Identity Team. The idea behind this theme was to have a uniform theme across all platforms (Windows, MacOS and Linux) that at the same time blended well with the default look of each of them.

It is also available at addons.mozilla.org.

Finally, Winstripe 2.0 as we know it today in Firefox 1.5 with a revamped Options window, live bookmarks icon, and a new set of icons.