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

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Arthur Pemberton wrote:
On 10/2/06, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 19:37:10 +0000,
  Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> 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.

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[Index of Archives]     [Fedora Announce]     [Fedora Kernel]     [Fedora Testing]     [Fedora Formulas]     [Fedora PHP Devel]     [Kernel Development]     [Fedora Legacy]     [Fedora Maintainers]     [Fedora Desktop]     [PAM]     [Red Hat Development]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]
  Powered by Linux