Firefox trademark shenanigans (Re: Any chance of getting Firefox 2.0 into rawhide/FC6?)

[Christopher Aillon]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On 10/2/06, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 19:37:10 +0000,
>>   Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>> > Christopher Aillon <caillon <at> redhat.com> writes:
>> > > Fedora does what Fedora wants.  I've pushed for new releases 
>> because I
>> > > can't possibly keep up with the security backporting.  See above.  
>> The
>> > > fact that I want to meet their needs at this time is a coincidence.
>> >
>> > Don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying version upgrades are a bad thing 
>> (I'm all
>> > for them), just that not having a choice is a bad thing.
>> >
>> > Thanks for the explanations.
>> >
>> > It's not just IE, by the way, pretty much all the browsers have 
>> "Mozilla" in
>> > their UA strings nowadays. ;-)
>> > Konqueror identifies itself as:
>> > "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.4 (like 
>> Gecko)"
>>
>> I believe this dates back to the browser wars when IE was playing 
>> catch up.
>> Web servers were checking the user agent string for 'Mozilla' before 
>> sending
>> pages using Netscape extentions to HTML. When IE was able to hand those
>> extensions, they still weren't being used because the web sites were 
>> all being
>> updated to take into account its new features. So they started using 
>> 'Mozilla'
>> in their user agent string to make their browser work 'better' on 
>> those web
>> sites.
>>
> 
> Seems to me that MozCo needs to start going after other browser before
> they pick fights with distros.


You should bring that up with them.  But again, 'Mozilla' has long since 
been diluted.  There's no interest in that.  'Firefox' is the 
interesting brand name these days and if they feel they need to protect 
it, then that's their call.  They are a little touchy on that subject 
anyway.

An interesting back story on why they want to protect it.  Back in the 
day, there were some people who liked the Mozilla suite but didn't like 
the fact that IE only websites didn't work.  So they added patches to 
make it more IE-like.  The problem is they didn't know the source code 
that well (it's a huge beast) so their patches broke important things 
such as standards compliance.  The patches were rejected from upstream 
and they decided that since it was open source, they would just make 
their own builds and issue it out to people as Mozilla.

Kudos to them, they had a good following.  But there was some press 
about Mozilla not having as good standards support as expected, because 
some people in the press or online journal or something had gotten their 
hands on the other copy.  Long story short, that was eventually 
corrected in both the news source and the patches eventually got 
dropped, and right around then, Mozilla started becoming popular anyway, 
so many people forget that story.  But that's the general type of thing 
the Mozilla guys would like to prevent.