Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Yes: the concept of browsing the web with your privacy preserved has literally zero to do with the concept of bravery. The name is clearly a statement but not one that's ever made any sense to me.

View on HN

That's not "appropriation", that's just marketing. You can call that "appropriation" if you want but it really just dilutes the very concept you're trying to invoke.

Right, Ubuntu might be considered an appropriated name, but hopefully not because the name is used respectfully by someone who, while not Nguni, is at least familiar with the people.

Not sure appropriated is the word you’re looking for.

re-appropriated

Brave bought the brave.com domain from the band Brave Combo, whose homepage was listed as http://brave.com/bo since the early days of the web. Last year I was pleased to see that they kept a redirect in place from https://brave.com/bo to band's new site https://bravecombo.com but it appears they've discontinued that courtesy. Too bad.

Doesn’t have anything to do with firefoxes or electroplated chromium either. Shrug.

Pedantic historical browser etymology note: Firefox began as Phoenix, because it was metaphorically rising from the ashes of Netscape. For trademark reasons, they changed it to Firebird. Then they learned that there was already an open source DB using that name, so they picked Firefox.

The other browsers don't have "normal" names either.

Chrome and Internet Explorer are both trivially descriptive names.

Internet Explorer maybe, but Chrome? I don't think "Chrome" screams web browser to me. "Safari" seems more trivial than Chrome.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=browser%20ch...

Apparently the main reason Chrome has the name is that the dev team leads like fast cars and that was the initial project code name. The reference to "UI Chrome" was largely an accident.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/google-chrome-reason-revealed...

And doesn’t actually make much sense, as Chrome when it was released made a point of having vastly less ‘chrome’ than the incumbent IE.

But it was a thin "chrome" over webkit (well, at the time...)

Long before Google Chrome development began (and to this day), Firefox code has used the term “chrome” internally to distinguish between privileged JavaScript code used in the Firefox UI and regular JavaScript from web content.

Sure "browser chrome" suggests a web browser.

But "chrome" to mean user interface is pretty far down the list of definitions for chrome, and even the most generous interpretation is similar to GUI/UI/UX and that doesn't exactly say "web browser".

Internet Explorer yes, Chrome no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com