Interesting. It says they're the same thing, but then the two characters listed on the page (the regular backslash and the Unicode variant) are rendered noticeably differently.

I can't imagine why they changed the name, given that the forward slash and the solidus are not interchangeable. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/5c/index.htm

Look at the HTML. The "unicode variant" is rendered differently because the code tells the browser to render it differently, not because it's a different character.

    <span style="font-size:125%"><span class="Unicode">\</span></span>

Ah, thanks. I was on my phone and didn't think to check the source.

EDIT: Actually, this explanation is enlightening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Encoding