[asadotzler]

No.

Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name.

We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again.

I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

[amandasystems]

You had me at “BIOS web browser”

[shrikant]

I thought Phoenix may have just made that up because they were miffed about someone in tech using their name, but no, they actually did have a "BIOS web browser"!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020618092004/https://www.xbitl...

[9point6]

I'm assuming some kind of instant-on OS feature

which if you're interested—Cathode Ray Dude on youtube has several episode series all about that weird and wonderful point of computer history

[ahartmetz]

> We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

Nice. Now I wonder if the ~0.8? era extension "Firesomething" was directly inspired by that whiteboard. IIRC it randomly combined two components from lists.

[simcop2387]

Ah neat, I didn't realize it was the bios maker that was behind that one, I thought it was the IBPhoenix product, it's been way too long since all that happened and I think it's all gotten jumbled in my memory.

[RexM]

Did you also come up with Sharknado in this whiteboarding exercise?

[guessbest]

It was Firebird. Thanks for correcting me.

[dataf3l]

was waterduck considered?

[grishka]

Technically, all real-life ducks are waterducks. Except when they're temporarily airducks.

[blackenedgem]

Stormcow

[Bluestein]

Tornadocalf