Perfect example of Mozilla dishonesty and arrogance [LWN.net]

Perfect example of Mozilla dishonesty and arrogance

Posted May 15, 2003 7:00 UTC (Thu) by msutherland (guest, #11201)
In reply to: Perfect example of Mozilla dishonesty and arrogance by jesup
Parent article: Christopher Blizzard of mozilla.org Speaks on the Firebird Naming Conflict (MozillaZine)

> The Mozilla staff (& drivers) are not being 'dishonest' in this.

Sure they are. Are you telling me that you buy this line of bullshit?

Give me a break.

> fighting against an MS product with such high penetration that MS can pretty much ignore or force the standards and we have to suck it up and find ways to be compatible.

The sorry group of clowns that run Mozilla.org have only one thing to blame for that... themselves. They started at a time when Netscape enjoyed significant marketshare and had support of the mighty MS foe, AOL, only to screw themselves left and right by becoming obsessed with cross-platform idealogy and ultra-adherence to the W3C in lieu of everything else.

As a result, after over 5 years... Mozilla.org spits out what will forever be known as the Blob of the Millenium... Mozilla 1.0. Unsurprisingly, less than a year after the Mozilla 1.0 atrocity, some genius nitwits finally figure out that something isn't quite right with the hellish monstrosity that is Mozilla... with the latest hopes of salvations being on the thing called Phoenix.

Mozilla.org fucked themselves. They fucked themselves by becoming so tied up and obsessed with their ideals that in the end... they became irrelevant.

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Perfect example of Mozilla dishonesty and arrogance

Posted May 15, 2003 13:58 UTC (Thu) by asacarny (guest, #11228) [Link]

"Oh wait! Firebird is meant as the *project* name for the former Phoenix. Mozilla Browser will be the *product* name. Sorry for the confusion, but we needed to have some name for Mozilla Browser in Bugzilla. And the naming of Firebird in the Mozillazine forums, FireBird(TM).... well, that's just a typo. We never said this before because we thought it was obvious when we first announced the name Firebird, after 6+ months of everyone waiting, that Mozilla Browser would be the true name."

I have been following the Mozilla project for some time. In its earlier stages, webpages and "fan" sites used the name SeaMonkey quite often. As the project has progressed, we now usually see people calling it Mozilla with SeaMonkey mentioned only rarely.

I see no reason why the Firebird name should not experience the same fate. The roadmap outlines changes in Mozilla under the hood, and not ones that should confuse the user. As a result, the names for each component in Mozilla's next major production release must be comparable to those of the previous release. Using the names "Mozilla Thunderbird" or "Mozilla Firebird" would not make sense to a user who usually clicks the "Mozilla" icon to start his or her browser.

Is it just me, or is all of this common sense? It doesn't take a roadmap for me to realize that product names can't go changing with every upgrade.
Adam