As someone who was heavily involved in the project at the time that this was all going on, the narrative in this blog post is not remotely accurate. Not only i

As someone who was heavily involved in the project at the time that this was all going on, the narrative in this blog post is not remotely accurate. Not only is the narrative around bullying patently false, but this post doesn't even answer the question in the title. One of the founding members of the Mozilla Project, Asa Dotzler, recently posted publicly on LinkedIn reminiscing about how the name was chosen[1]. Straight from the horses mouth, they wanted a name that matched up to the email client ThunderBird, so they were testing different element and animal name combinations, which is how Firefox was arrived at. The name Firebird continued to be used internally as a project codename until the 1.0 release, as noted by Chris Blizzard in the interview with MozillaZine. Project codenames are generally not intended to be the final product name, and in this case when Firefox went 1.0 it was named Firefox and the trademark was already registered in the US. There's plenty of valid criticisms that could be levied around the choice of names... after all one of the hardest things in computer science is naming things, but everyone involved in the early days of Mozilla were decent people who just wanted to use software to improve the web and the world, there was definitely no malice behind anyone's actions. I'm not sure who the author of this post is, but is seems like they're employing motivated reasoning layered on top of hindsight without any empathy towards the people actually involved. That's setting aside the fact that the narrative is not true, and is borderline a bald-faced lie. [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7181470126913847298?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_feedUpdate%3A%28V2%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7181470126913847298%29 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7181470...