A couple weeks ago, the Mozilla development team announced that after the 1.4 release of Mozilla they'll be switching primary development to separate browser and mail clients, codenamed Firebird and Thunderbird.
Since then, there's been a whole lot of heated discussion, mostly coming from supporters of the Firebird database project, about objections to Mozilla "stealing" their name. Regardless of who thinks who did what, the database project no more owns that name than the Mozilla group does. In the immortal words of CmdrTaco, "As always, a small group of users are being real asses about the whole thing. Yay." 'Nuff said.
Anyway, in response to this debate, a "Mozilla Branding" document was released today to clarify their branding strategy. To sum up:
- "Mozilla Application Suite" is the name of the full Mozilla suite that we know it as today
- "Firebird" and "Thunderbird" are the codenames of the standalone browser and mail clients, respectively, that will be used until Mozilla 1.4 is released
- After the 1.4 release, the standalone client codenames will be dropped in favor of "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail".
The full document and additional details can be found here:
http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/branding.html