You mentioned getfirefox.com and while that was and is the official site, I remember a time (maybe?) when that was registered to a third-party fan of Firefox to promote it who handed it over to Mozilla. That said… I cannot find any evidence to back up this claim after a small bit of Google searching, so I might be wrong. I definitely remember a time after the rebranding was announced but before the full 1.0 launch where the moz website didn’t have an easy or obvious landing page for Firefox because so much website energy was still reserved for the open sourced Mozilla communications suite ;-) It always felt a bit new and edgy to recommend Firefox (Phoenix? Firebird?) back in the old days. Weirdly, there was a time when it was new and edgy to recommend Chrome too. Now it’s probably new and edgy to recommend… ad-blocking? Edge Read Aloud? It was easier when IE provided a common enemy and when Chrome wasn’t the only choice for low performance Android devices, or Safari on iOS.
Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)
If I recall correctly, getfirefox.com was the de-facto site because an individual blogger had owned and been using firefox.com. Mozilla was finally able to acquire the firefox.com domain and for a time, offered a free redirect to the original blog. I also tried to find a link to corroborate the history but was unable to do so, just the WHOIS data below. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
WHOIS data for firefox.com says it was created in October 1998, four years before the Firefox project was started in 2002, and six years before the 1.0 release in 2004.
WHOIS data for getfirefox.com says it was created in April 2004, seven months before the 1.0 release.
You might be right. I remember a domain handover, but maybe it was firefox.com rather than getfirefox.com … I vaguely recall the opposite though, that somebody ended up redirecting to the Mozilla site pre-acquisition as a way of promoting Firefox. I vaguely recall knowing that the ownsership transfer took place because suddenly the URL that the domain redirected you to had some extra tracking query parameters added to it.
The earliest version of getfirefox.com redirects to Mozilla’s Firefox homepage which while it sells the browser does not have a clear Download link. I remember one of the earliest fan-made Firefox sites having a prominent download link as a way of helping people install the browser and switch to Firefox before there was a switch campaign site. https://web.archive.org/web/20040619171818/http://mozilla.or...
Wait… based on my previous lookups, I think it was SpreadFirefox.com or something related to that. https://web.archive.org/web/20040929012122/http://www.spread... I think the idea started as a quick webpage to download Firefox and turned into a Mozilla site to promote the browser…? It sounds right though I’ve forgotten some of the details. I definitely remember linking to some site off spreadfirefox.com because it was easier to find the download link there than to find it at the official site…
Re third party sites, it’s likely getfirefox was actually always Mozilla’s (they would have known about the name first, of course) so maybe I’m thinking of “getfirebird.com” or something else like that. It’s even possible that I just assumed it was third-party because it redirected to the main Mozilla site for the longest time. And it really probably doesn’t matter anyway, just a digression. :)