Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

negative man cometh and sayeth:

meh? not much to say tonight? there's other extensions, ya know... http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2006/08/firebug_a_devel.html

Strange that you chose to promote FireBug now, rather than waiting for it to be updated for Firefox 2 or doing so before Firefox 2 came out.

Do they have our permission to call it Fire[animal] and use "our" font? Do they need our permission?

Yes, the thoughts about the logo crossed my mind too.

Firebug is indeed probably the best web developer tool out there today. It has saved me countless hours.

Jesse > The 0.4.1 version that was released on Oct 13 is compatible with FF2 [http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/firebug_and_fir.php], got it with the update a couple of weeks ago..

Oh, it is compatible. The "Install Firebug for Firefox 1.5" graphic scared me away and I didn't look at install.rdf.

The only thing that is bad about firebug is that I miss it terribly when I'm debugging web apps in IE. To make matters worse, IE is where I need to debug the most.

I often wonder why things like this and NoScript aren't included with the default install, like the DOM Inspector is.

Jesse,

The font used for the firefox logo is called MetaBoldLF-Roman, and is commercially available

>> Do they have our permission to call it Fire[animal] and use "our" font? Do they need our permission?

why are the mozilla folks so paranoid about people naming the stuff fire(insert name) what's wrong with that? seems like Apple started a trend! (sarcasm)

- maybe choose a name no one would want to use such as WaffleDingoo..

Jesse, trademark law is actually pretty simple. All one has to do to make the call on something like this is to ask the question "Does this create customer confusion" or more specifically, will Firefox customers confuse Firefox and Firebug and do we (mozilla) think that has a negative impact on our customers or our brand.

Personally, I think there is no problem here. We have no claim to Fire[animals] other than the fox and we certainly have no claim to exclusive use of a font we don't even own (copyright).

I could see a situation where someone using a Fire[animal], our color scheme, our font, and a similar logo to brand an alternative web browser could confuse our users and cause them and us harm. I don't think this comes anywhere near to that, though.

- A

FireBug obviously isn't a web browser, but I could imagine someone seeing the similar name and identical font and thinking FireBug is "from the same people who make Firefox". But it's high-quality software aimed at smart people, so I wouldn't ask them to change the name unless we had to.

I'm going to make archiving software, call it Firebox, with a fox encircling a box. It will be orange, and pretty. :)

I have found that firebug 1.01 is still buggy, it has memory leaks which eventually causes firefox to get super slow. Now somebody correct me if I'm wrong.