Mozilla Phoenix^WFirebird^WFirefox...

[pne]

timwi brought to my attention that the Mozilla's browser-only project has been renamed again, this time to "Firefox" [page currently overloaded], now that 0.8 is out. ("Thunderbird" is still called that, though.)

See also his journal entry.

(Random linguistic note: at first, I wrote "Timwi made me aware of the fact that..." but I discarded that as being too close to the German construction "Timwi machte mich darauf aufmerksam, dass..." which led me to doubt its idiomaticity(?).)

Edit: Their roadmap says that they want to "be building up an aggressive campaign to market the Firefox browser".

Renaming it fits right into a marketing campaign, I'm sure! Nothing quite like it to boost brand recognition!

Edit 2: See also the press release and the name change FAQ (if you can get it to load), as well as the SlashDot article.

Edit 3: Apparently, Mozilla have trademarked "Firefox" in the class of "Browsers, namely, software for browsing and interacting with data on the global computer network and secure private networks, and software programs to connect computers to the global computer network and to secure private networks", so hopefully this name change will be the last one.

Comments

[rho]

Firebird and thunderbird always made me think of the legendary bird pokemon, moltres and zapdos. Now they've changed it to firefox, I'm just going to start thinking of it as entei, I think.

(Yes, I'm sad)

Re:

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

There's one called Magmar that's a Fire type and is foxish...
Though Moltres/Zapdos is definitely cooler than Magmar/Zapdos =P

Pokémon

[pne.livejournal.com]

I have little idea of what either of you is talking about...

...but I'm sure you're both right :)