tl;dr: On Zotero's 20th anniversary, co-creator Dan Cohen recounts how the research tool emerged from years of slow, collaborative thinking at George Mason's Center for History and New Media, evolving from earlier tools like Web Scrapbook and Scribe before Firefox's XUL extension system made the vision technically feasible in 2004. The team iterated through names (SmartFox, Firefox Scholar) before settling on an Albanian word, launching in October 2006 to 60,000 users within a month. Cohen argues this deliberate pace—impossible to replicate with today's "ask for what you want" AI coding—is precisely what produced software durable enough to still be widely used two decades later.