Kind of a click-baity title; I apologize.
For some while now I’ve been seeing the abbreviation of Firefox slowly mutate from Fx/fx to FF.
From the release notes:
How do I spell Firefox? How do I abbreviate it?
Firefox is spelled F-i-r-e-f-o-x - only the first letter capitalized (i.e. not FireFox, not Foxfire, FoxFire or whatever else a number of folk seem to think it to be called.) The preferred abbreviation is “Fx” or “fx”.
I mean, it makes total sense to abbreviate Firefox with two capital Fs, and the documentation does say “preferred abbreviation,” but I just wanted to make those of you who didn’t know about this aware…aware of the fact that you’re abbreviating Fx wrong, God dammit!
Fx? Function? Effects?
It’s such an ambiguous abbreviation that I don’t expect people to use it.
In medical abbreviations, Fx is fracture
jesus
Absolutely no one is using “Fx” or “fx”, especially since it would be easily confused with “special effects”. Intended or not, FF is the common one and everyone knows it as that too.
FFX is the okayest of all FF
Fx? Would have never guessed. If I start using that, people probably won’t know what I’m talking about.
Yeah, exactly, I’ll use what lets people understand me
Yeah I will use what people recognize rather than the thing the org did not bother to utilize early and often enough to be recognized by most.
FF may not be what Mozilla invented or preferred, but it has over time become the de facto abbreviation.
People will understand if I refer to FF in a context where we’re talking about browsers. They will not understand “Fx”. It’d rather be understood than “”“correct”“”.
neat bit of info. I’ll still continue using ff and pronouncing gif as gif
You monster! It’s clearly “gif”.
They just let anyone on the internet nowadays. It’s GIF, not GIF. Get it right.
Get it right or Get It Fight
I feel like I wasted 60 seconds… now 120 seconds of my life reading and typing up this reply.
Who is abbreviating Firefox? Who capitalizes FireFox this way, and why would it really matter to anyone.
And who made the decision to abbreviate it Fx… that’s a horrible decision.
JavaFx is what first comes to mind to me, but it’s such a common abbreviation, as others have pointed out.
Sorry for wasting your time, bro
Nothing of the sort on your behalf. I learned something, just it seems so dumb that before the Spread Firefox campaign in the early 2000’s, they put so much thought into such an abbreviation. It must have been an internal thing, that the regular populace never really adopted.
Speaking of… apparently the Spread Firefox campaign was often abbreviated SFX… makes sense based on the context provided from your post, but I would never in a million years associate SFX with that… I’d think “Sound Effects” or something.
Like the time when a kid in school tried to create their own nickname and everyone noped the fuck out and carried on calling them the same thing they were.
You don’t get to pick your nickname, even if you started trying 20 years ago, FF.
I avoid the issue of how to abbreviate Firefox by just using Internet Explorer, IE.
Easy peasy. 🤙
love this post 🫡 be pedantic and hold onto the old ways.
I’ve used FF since the first versions. It makes sense since the name is a combo of two words that start with F. I get that technically the second should be lowercase, but that looks weird. I missed Mozilla’s memo on the preferred version back then…
I think with a lot of things like grammar police and such, usually if the context makes it clear what’s being talked about and there’s no confusion, it doesn’t matter that much for informal discussion. I do admit if someone said “Fx” while talking about browser stuff, before now it would have taken a second to realize what they meant. Shows I’ve never seen it before.
Time to piss off both camps an start calling it f5x.
I havent
I’ve been using FXX
I didn’t realize we were abbreviating it, but I think we should stop because it’s dumb. Thank you for attending my Ted talk.
