The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

November 2, 2006

Trademark Clarification

Mike Connor blogs that "The trademark and copyrighted icon were not created by the community. Firefox and its icon was created by the Mozilla Foundation in private, as a brand used for “official” releases as a sign of quality."

I think I understand what Mike is trying to say here, but this sentence is far too easily misinterpreted. I believe he is saying that the Mozilla Foundation can be credited with taking steps towards protecting the Firefox mark, by filing a trademark, and owning the copyright on the graphic image icon.

It is however not correct to say that the Mozilla Foundation "created" either actual entity in substance, since both of them were created by community members who volunteered their contribution to the cause.

The Mozilla Foundation as an entity did NOT:

Create the name: that was Jason "kerz" Kersey who owns the community advocacy and discussion site MozillaZine on which this blog is run. He came up with the name, and I have the IRC logs that show him doing it. Jason was aware that the new name would be trademarked by the Mozilla Foundation and he was happy to help contribute to the naming process.
Create the artwork, even though it holds the copyright to it. The artwork was created by Jon Hicks, a volunteer who has also contributed icons to the Camino project, and other Open Source projects. The final artwork was based on a sketched concept by members of the team at Silverorange, who became involved with Firefox because Steven Garrity posted a detailed complaint about Mozilla graphic design, and some of us said "we're accepting patches" in the traditional Open Source fashion, and Steven and his company were nice enough to oblige. Jon and the Silverorange team were happy to contribute copyright ownership of these works to the Mozilla Foundation with the knowledge they would become part of the trademark.

I just wanted to make sure everyone understood these historical facts when interpreting Mike's blog.

Posted by ben at November 2, 2006 12:09 PM

Comments

Hi!

I just found the Feb '06 comments about the memory hogging situation, and I think it's happening to my computer even though I have firefox 1.5.0.8. Firefox always is using tons more RAM than any other application I have open.

My computer has 256 RAM, with a PIII-1.1 chip, and it typically starts at about 80 when the computer is turned on and cycles down to 0, at which point the computer is frozen while FreeRamXPPro starts and kicks it back up to about 80 or so. It does this about 3-4 times per hour.

I typically have 4-5 firefox windows open. Usually one will have 15-40 tabs open and the others 0-15. I never use the back arrow, just tabs.

I am now thinking of switching to the new MS Explorer that just came out and see if that will solve the memory problem for me.

I have liked using Firefox, but this memory usage situation seems out of control. I was planning on getting a new computer soon, but from what I read it doesn't matter how much RAM you have or how fast your computer is, if Firefox is sucking up all your RAM, your computer will run very slowly.

Posted by: cliff at November 15, 2006 2:04 AM

hi dear FireFox!
I'm an Iranian user of you and want tell you when I browse persian(farsi)
pages that their's page titles are farsi,and save them you(firefox 1.5 and 2)
can't open them after saving!!! but IE can!
and since you (firefox) are more better than IE please fix this bug!

your lover
---------
Amin Diary

Posted by: Amin Diary at November 22, 2006 9:05 AM

I don't know why but Firefox is always much more unstable for me, if I open more than 10 tabs. I work with Opera instead and it's managing to operate with 100 tabs easily.

Posted by: neon at November 29, 2006 5:02 AM

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