'Der Spiegel' Reports on Mozilla Firefox 0.8Tuesday February 10th, 2004Daniel Küstner writes: "Spiegel Online, one of the biggest German news sites and the online spin-off of the biggest German news magazine, Der Spiegel, is reporting about the name change. The article is about the new version 0.8, the change from Phoenix via Firebird to Firefox, the naming conflicts and mentions some firework companies named Firefox and the red Panda. They also state, that 'besides the Apple browser Safari, Firefox is said to be the leanest and fastest complete program for navigating the web.' They have a link to http://www.mozilla.org/releases/." AltaVista's automated Babelfish translation is just about understandable. Update: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent us links to two more German language articles about Firefox 0.8, this time from Austrian sites. The newspaper der Standard talks about the name change and new features and a page from the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation provides background on the issues surrounding the name change (Babelfish translation of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation article). "With the latest 0.8 release of Firefox, however, things appear to be changing. This browser version is not built with XUL, but with GTK2" Hmm. Ah, I don't believe this is quite true. If you take apart the files that come with Firefox you will find the UI is still XUL based. I believe the difference is that the XUL is now communicating with the GTK2 toolkit and calling up native widgets. So while the widgets might be native XUL interpretation still exists. How come supposedly tech writers can't understand this? I think, you mixed the articles. Your citation is from the mozillazine article below, which is referring to an article written by a user, not a tech writer. "AltaVista's automated Babelfish translation is just about understandable." ...and always a good laugh. ;) Quite lame article, 90% of it was about the name change and some other companies/movies/books/blah that are also called Firefox, not much about the browser itself... That's just a reflection of what's happened elsewhere. The MozillaZine article is at least 50% about the name change. And if you look at the comments on the front page story and in the forum, they're nearly all about the name change. Same with slashdot. A point release with a download manager and a bookmark and XPInstall dialog improvements isn't "big news" that people want to talk about. Trademark disputes, the choice of name and people having arguments are. I'm not saying that's good, but... What firefox needs most is for people to hear it exists. This trademark dispute and renaming ordeal could very well be a good thing marketingwise over time. The article may be mediocre at best, but since Der Spiegel is not a technology centered publication, this is great publicity! It's already a bigger than big success that Firefox made it into one of the most read German magazines. It's not important that more than half of the article is about the name change. That it got mentioned at all is the success. Right below the headline it says "Mozillas 'Firebird' Browser is spiffy, small and fast" - what else do you want? |
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