You probably have read it alread Gaim will be renamed to Pidgin. Most likely because of AOL being unhappy with them using AIM in their name (although they support a dozen other messengers as well; getting rid of AIM in the name was also 'wanted' by the Gaim developers I guess).

However, such software renames eventually cause some problems. For example, will the API also be renamed? Will libgaim become libpidgin? Will the DBus interfaces change their name? A dozen of applications might be affected by that, including the popular AdiumX messenger for OSX. (One of the prettiest I've seen so far, btw.)

Other examples of such renames (and the problems caused by that) is the Mozilla chaos. Mozilla doens't allow to distribute modified versions of Firefox or Thunderbird under these names, so Debian has to replace the names (though most of our patches at some point are adopted by upstream, or they'd be okay with them, Debian also has the requirement that our users must be able to do their own modifications!). This is why etch just shipped with "Iceweasel" and "Icedove" instead.

However some web sites don't test for the browsers "Gecko" version, and for example Google Groups, when trying to set the profile image, tells me I need to run Firefox or Internet Explorer. Though I'm pretty sure the function would just work fine with both Epiphany (my primary browser) and Iceweasel.

The transition from "cdrecord" to "wodim" was a bit smoother. On the one hand, many application were already expecting functionality not present in the "official" cdrecord (and yes, Joerg, I know that your opinion might differ on that point - I don't care, nor does anybody else I know). On the other hand, it mostly affects programs included in the distribution, so they can be easily handled. There aren't random websites testing for it either, and custom scripts written by users can probably handled via a wrapper (this is much more difficult for libraries I guess, or the DBus API of Gaim. Fortunately for Gaim, these interfaces aren't used much, so it can be solved with a simple search and replace and recompilation in affected applications).

I think when more distributions switch from Firefox to Iceweasel because of realizing that it might be important to some of their users and recommend Epiphany because of it's smoother user interface, we might also see less websites doing incorrect browser capability detection.