It was a magical time, hearing the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the Internet. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while...
I believe the joke was something like it was spelled “Netscape” but pronounced “Mozilla”. Web searches (at time of writing) for “pronounced Mozilla” seem to confirm this. I also seem to remember that its user-agent string identifier was “Mozilla” from the earliest version and never contained “Netscape”, which goes some way to explaining why I initially forgot the real history and assumed a rebranding to Firefox.
If I remember correctly, at one point Mozilla referred to itself as “the godzilla of Mosaic” or something like that.
Mosaic being the first widely available web browser.
I believe the joke was something like it was spelled “Netscape” but pronounced “Mozilla”. Web searches (at time of writing) for “pronounced Mozilla” seem to confirm this. I also seem to remember that its user-agent string identifier was “Mozilla” from the earliest version and never contained “Netscape”, which goes some way to explaining why I initially forgot the real history and assumed a rebranding to Firefox.