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Comment by simcop2387 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't Firebug, that was a developer tool extension. It was first Phoenix which hit trademark issues, and then Firebird which hit trademark issues, which then became Firefox.

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From what I remember, Firebird was more related to the database open source project which was a fork of InterBase, so at that time it was relatively well known due to its roots with IB.

Maybe it hit trademark issues, but the reason I remember from slashdot was that phoenix was already a semi-popular open source project in the debian repository, so firefox had to be named from phoenix to mozilla-phoenix. But firefox at the time still named phoenix just ran so much better on windows than linux, it was funny.

Both Phoenix and Firebird were over the naming and trademark clashes:

For firebird, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-holds-fire-i... and https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozillas-fir... in this case it was AOL Time Warner that owned the Firebird trademark for the database.

2) For Phoenix, https://web.archive.org/web/20070914035447/http://www.ibphoe... the main reporting on it seems to be lost but wikipedia still backs it up

Phoenix was because of a challenge from Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker. Firefox was because of concerns about stomping on a small OSS project, the Firebird Database. I was responsible for all of this at Mozilla. Happy to answer any questions.

Thanks for clarifying! FWIW, I wasn't there, but that matches exactly what I remember from that time (I did follow all the different renamings in detail).

No.

Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name.

We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again.

I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

was waterduck considered?

Stormcow

Tornadocalf

Technically, all real-life ducks are waterducks. Except when they're temporarily airducks.

Did you also come up with Sharknado in this whiteboarding exercise?

You had me at “BIOS web browser”

I'm assuming some kind of instant-on OS feature

which if you're interested—Cathode Ray Dude on youtube has several episode series all about that weird and wonderful point of computer history

I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...

> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.

Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.

It was Firebird. Thanks for correcting me.

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