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Mozilla Firebird gets .8 Release, and New Name
Yage writes "Firebird, the lightweight version of Mozilla gets release 0.8 and changes its name again (remember Phoenix?) to avoid confusion with another OSS project. The new name is Firefox. There's a press release out about the name change and new version. And, as usual, download it from
mozilla.org." Worth noting that ThunderBird .5 has been released as well. Update: 02/09 14:55 GMT by H : Thanks to Steve Garrity for pointing out the name change FAQ.
I can overlook their game of musical names; the browser is just phenomenal. I seldom even go to IE anymore, and when I do have to, I blame the guy who coded the site, not Firebird -- I mean Firefox.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
The good things about the name:
I've said this in the past, and I will say it again. If you are naming your open source software, make it something unique. Why would you want to compete for search terms with all these other people, products, corporations, and organizations. If your product has merit, then people will recognize the name that you give it and you will get brand loyalty. There is no need show your similarity to other products or your system requirements in your name.
Though I have to admit, for my typical browsing experience I don't see a whole lot of difference between Firebird's latest 0.7 release and Firefox. I'll explore the new tweaks and nifties sooner or later, I suppose.
Now, somebody tell me at what point the name's going to change again and I can run Firefly 0.9 as my browser of choice? That would be sweet, the icon could be a tiny image of the Serenity...for the current icon, has anyone else wondered if that fox is having a little too much fun with the globe?
But I digress. I'm looking forward to the 1.0 release, whatever the name ends up being. I'd be interested in knowing what the official marketshare (as far as these things can be determined) is for Fire-[$animal_name]/Mozilla browsers. I know that I've had more stability/popup-blocking goodness out of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox than I usually get out of IE, and far fewer crashes (Firebird crashed on me once on my XP Pro box. Once in how many months? Let's not even think about IE's crash frequency...)
Stupid quote of the day: "That browser sucks...it doesn't even support VBScript!"
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
(this is on XP): I open up FireFox and have no bookmarks, even though I have hundreds in Mozilla. Oh, I mean I don't have none. I have some basic ones they give you to start with. And my imported IE bookmarks, of which there are none, because I don't use IE. But no Mozilla bookmarks.
So I close Firebird, go into my Mozilla profile, copy the "bookmarks.html" file from it to the FireFox profile(still in a folder called "Phoenix"), and bam, there's all my bookmarks. Why the damn browser can't do that for me is beyond comprehension.
Same with all my preferences. No option to inherit these things from Mozilla.
Overall it is quite a nice browser, and I'd recommend it to people whose computers are too slow/low on memory for the real thing. I still prefer Mozilla, mainly because I think the Modern theme looks better than FireFox's default, because I can't see an easy way to keep FireFox in memory like I do with Mozilla, and because FireFox lacks the wonderful Mozilla ability to simply type text into the URL bar, hit the up key and then enter, and run a Google search. I find the separate Google search field an annoying complication of Mozilla's search ability.
I'm glad they've changed the name. It took astonishing arrogance to swipe the name of an existing FOSS project, knowing full-well that any name they used would, by virtue of Mozilla's mindshare, end up damaging any group already using the name. It shows a willingness to be reasonable that they've changed it and the only grouse I have is the length of time it's taken them to do so.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From the FAQ:
Won't this confuse people?
Yes, but if the WWF can pull it off, so can we. Besides, in six months you'll forget there ever was any other name.
This is amusing.
Do they mean the WWF (conservation group) that originally had the name, and so took the WWF (the wrestling group) to court to force them to change their name? Or do they mean the WWF that either settled or lost the case, and agreed to change their name to WWE?
In either case, it involves lawsuits!
I'd really like native SVG support to start appearing in the builds - last I checked the old code is still in the tree. Are there still political/licensing issues preventing it from being in the default builds?
Stop playing name games. That's the sort of thing that can really hurt adoption.
You're right, that valuable brand recognition is damaged by name changes.
But there were enough problems with the Firebird moniker to justify the name change. And, arguably, with bare single digit percentage market penetration, it's still early in the game; name changes aren't as such a big deal to the party faithful.
A really important step to promote the growth of firefox might be overlooked: their little button logos available for you to put on your web site.
As a responsible web site maintainer, these buttons can go alongside some previously collected good button merit badges such as
- W3C complaince with standards HTML 4, CSS, XHTML 1, MathML, SVG, etc.
- works best with any browser
including text only."Provided by the management for your protection."
My personal site:Different numbers. This site has all kinds of weird stuff on it, some Linux-specific.
My SELinux site:Pretty obvious. Yes, part of it is a debian mirror for the SELinux packages, that's how apt-get gets in there.
All these numbers are from February, i.e. as fresh as they can be.
What do they show? At least as far as I am concerned, the "95% of the people use IE" is a myth, a lie, a marketing gimmick, whatever you want to call it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org