Mozilla Branding Strategy Clarified

scottfi writes "Christopher Blizzard has published to mozilla.org an article entitled Mozilla Branding Strategy, which clarifies the position of mozilla.org on naming of the application suite and the separate applications in milestone 1.4 and beyond. The Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird names are simply codenames, and the resulting products will be referred to as 'Mozilla Browser' and 'Mozilla Mail'." This makes the whole name debate seem kind of moot. Luckily Futurama has yet to contact us for using their character names as our development codenames.

Comments

Re:Why all the drama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the developers are geeks and prefer cool-sounding code names. They (also, the code names) are not meant to see the light of day; indeed, the Mozilla suite itself is only for development purposes, not end-users.

Re:why now?

[bunratty]

Over a week ago, Asa pointed out that the Firebird name might not stick for more than a few months. In that post, he mentions Mozilla Browser as a possible name for the 1.5 release.

Re:Current Mozilla Browser out?

[bunratty]

Yes, the old Mozilla Application Suite will eventually be no more. It will live on perhaps for a few years on the 1.4 branch, but the Mozilla trunk will change over to Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird after the 1.4 release. For more details, see the Mozilla Roadmap.

Re:This doesn't change much IMO

[squiggleslash]

Because they didn't want to use the names as codenames. The submitter's summary doesn't match the artcle linked to. This is a climbdown, a messy slow one, but a climbdown nonetheless. I wrote an analysis here.

"Mozilla Firebird" is in the window title!

[njchick]

Current nightly snapshot of Phoenix is called phoenix-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz, the executable is called phoenix, however, the title bar has "Mozilla Firebird". It's not like they are using that name internally - it's exposed to the end users.

Re:"Mozilla Firebird" is in the window title!

[bunratty]

Yes, the article summary is wrong. Mozilla Firebird still is the name of the product until Mozilla version 1.4 is released. Read my many posts above for still further clarification.

Re:Happy ending

[bunratty]

Note that the 1.4 release is scheduled less than a month away.

But the roadmap has not been updated to indicate that the 1.4 branch will have release candidates in preparation for a new stable branch to replace the 1.0 branch. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several months for version 1.4 to be released, similar to what happened on the Mozilla 1.0 branch last year.

RTFA!

[russx2]

am I goiung to have an executable called 'firebird' on my system?

Clearly states that executables (and other resources) will be named using the app's 'mozilla' name (e.g. 'mozillabrowser' etc.)

Re:why now?

[bunratty]

Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.

The name Firebird was chosen because there were legal problems with the Phoenix name. The new name was needed so that a new version of Phoenix/Firebird could be released. So Firebird was never a replacement name for the Mozilla Browser, just a replacement for Phoenix. After Mozilla 1.4 is released, the trunk will switch over to use Firebird/Thunderbird, so then there will be no confusion calling them Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail.

Re:why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that's quite true. As someone who's worked on Mozilla for a couple of years now (not a member of mozilla.org, no official capacity, blah blah blah), this is basically consistent with everything that's happened before: the stuff released by mozilla.org is known simply as "Mozilla" or "Mozilla [component]" to refer to a specific component. Side projects like native browsers, etc. get the non-descriptive names like Firebird, Galeon, etc. Naming controversy or no, I wouldn't ever have expected the "Firebird" name to be applied to the browser once it became the main, shipping product of mozilla.org.

The one backdown I think I see came earlier, and it's prepending "Mozilla" to Firebird and Thunderbird; normally, "Mozilla" hasn't been attached to any of the subsidiary products.

Personally, I haven't been able to get too heated up about the whole debate: I think it would be courteous to change the name if it were reasonable, but by the time we came up with a name everyone liked, ran it through legal again, and so forth, Firebird would be so close to landing on the trunk and becoming "Mozilla" anyway that I don't think it's worth the effort.

Re:What about Composer etc.?

[bunratty]

From the Mozilla Roadmap:

The other integrated components of the Mozilla application suite, Calendar, Chatzilla, and Composer (the HTML editor application), are not going away, either. We're not sure yet how they'll evolve -- whether they'll become standalone toolkit applications (and if so, based on which XUL toolkit), or popular add-ons to Phoenix (if so, they will need to use its new XUL toolkit).