Have to get it off my chest - Firefox is a bad name for a web broswer (as is Thunderbird for a e-mail client). Why? Because the name is in English and it's hard to pronounce in many other languages. In this sense Phoenix was much better because legend of the Phoenix bird has been around for ages and thus the name is also widely known and has it's local pronounciations. Firefox is a good toungetwister in languages that tend to pronounce words the same way they are written. Thunderbird is of course even worse because of "th".
What could have been done better? A generic word that is easy to pronounce and probably contains lots of vowels. Google, Yahoo, Opera...
It's probably not that hard for younger people who have knowledge in English to start using those names but for older people. I certainly know that my mom will never be able to adopt it properly. And so it is much easier for her to just say "IE".
When you want to get people from all walks of life to start using your web browser then easy to spell and pronounce international name will make a big difference. Especially when half or more people are even not aware that they are using something called web browser and that it comes in different flavours. Wouldn't it be easier if mouth to mouth marketing worked because everyone say "Oh, I've got this new cool
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