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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's confirmed.

"In late September, Google released a compression algorithm called Brotli and gave files it makes the extension “.bro”.

But last week the extension was changed to “.br”.

The reason for the change is threads like this one, in which posters suggest that “'bro' has a gender problem” and “comes of[f] misogynistic and unprofessional due to the world it lives in.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/googles_bro_file_for...

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I would've preferred .brot

or just ".brotli"

modern filesystems can handle a few extra characters

The -li Ending, basically just the diminutive, is not necessary to convey the meaning. -br is "cold", -brot is "bread", -brotli is also "bread". I kind of like the whole archive.bread thing, but with the German sound to it.

but we don't want to type them. when was the last time you typed chdir instead of cd?

when was the last time you were in a shell that didn't have tab completion?

.br<tab> is the same number of characters as .bro

Filename autocompletion is a thing though, and especially for .brotli files, which would likely be generated by something like `brotli uncompressed.thing`, the length matters very little.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=br

So, instead of using a word which is mostly used as a friendly term of familiarity/endearment, they decided to go with a word which has connotations of racism.

I... can't even.

Symbian app installation files have ".sis" extension. Why can't we have ".bro" for parity?

Because no one has used Symbian in 10 years and the vast majority of us have never seen or heard of a .sis file? Not really parity if .sis is extraordinarily obscure and .bro becomes pervasive.

Don't speak for the entire world ("no one"), I personally know two guys that still use Symbian-powered smartphones and don't plan to change them to anything.

I know more people than that who still use a Commodore 64 on the regular. But, it doesn't make it a viable platform.

Newspeak, doublethink and thoughtcrimes

Because context.

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