Opera did the whole rebranding-retargetting-identity thing - it changed their marketing focus from technically people, to people playing volleyball on the beach who liked applying filters on selfies while drinking wine on a mid-summers day. It was the start of their sad and slow decline.
This reminds me of when Mozilla bough a beach design studio and hired designers to redesign the Firefox UI. Then nothing of worth of production value came out of it. Instead we got the dreaded Australis tabs years later.
But why does Mozilla really need a new identity? To me their identity feels really solid and strong. It's been exposed to developers and technically minded people for years and years, but also to regular users through Firefox.
I try Firefox from time to time because I'd really like to be using it. But as long as it remains less snappy and has worse text rendering than Chrome, while not offering much else in return, I delete it.
Yes, in the exact inverse way I'd want a non-profit like Mozilla to work.
By the way, do you understand how marketing works? Mozilla is not a lifestyle or luxury brand, and nobody cares about those things in browsers.
Firefox got a huge market share back in early 2000-2010 because it had a good product -- not because of branding. Heck, it wasn't even an official Mozilla branded effort at the start, just a project by some community members.
What? Whenever I try it, Chrome's font rendering is outright atrocious compared to Firefox...of all the reasons that one might prefer Chrome this has got to be the worst possible, by miles.
Is it possible you got used to the incorrect rendering or something? How do Edge and Safari look in comparison to you?
>What? Whenever I try it, Chrome's font rendering is outright atrocious compared to Firefox...
First of all, we're talking on the Mac, and with Retina display.
Second, "used to the incorrect rendering"? What's to be used? Firefox consistently has had not only less smooth font rendering, but also botched layouts and worse zoom behavior.
(Safari is pretty much close to Chrome. Edge, I don't use).
If it helps, I recently rolled back to the Firefox 45 ESR... it leaks memory like crazy but at least it streams audio and video without stuttering. I don't notice snappiness problems, but I also have a lot of RAM.
Despite being a web developer for some time, I have no idea what Mozilla's brand is. I'm obviously aware of Firefox, but I'm also conscious that Mozilla do lots of other things, but without looking I don't have any idea what the collective visual style is.
I know it doesn't really seem important, but a good visual identity can help make it clearer who is supporting particular projects – and for a positive community organisation like Mozilla that's probably a good thing.
Because their constant launching (and often subsequent closing) of products confuses their users. It seems to me that they want to be a research organization that helps advance technology and set standards, but they also produce products, etc.
I actually thought that "Burst" was fairly generic and...devoid of character myself (not that I could come up with a better design myself). But I'm unsurprised that "Protocol" didn't rate highly among consumers - I really doubt many people even use "http://" anymore.
on mobile most of the browsers hide this part from the URL. And yes, you don't have to type it in most of the times ( eventually switching from http to https )
Ironically enough, I really enjoyed my Geeksphone Keon, and it's Firefox OS platform. I liked the idea of making phone apps in HTML, CSS and JS and having them interact with native APIs through a standardized way. It's a shame it didn't work out. :/
They're in the best position to create an IoT / home server OS that does self-hosted calendar, email, pocket, facebook clone, baby photos backup, etc.
It's so sad they didn't go down that path and play to their strengths (openness/open source) and against the weaknesses of the other behemoths and instead decided to compete with android head on.
There's a dire need for a product like this with a lot of engineering muscle behind it (and not just because of snowden) just as there was for a real smartphone OS in 2007 that ordinary people could use.
As a webdeveloper I see some news about Mozilla now and then:
- new tooling
- new project launches
- new git repos
- evangelism at conferences/meetups
- a rare article about their funds
My idea based on these sporadic encounters is that they are continuously on the forefront of innovation. They have their share of strong and important products/projects/tools, but at the same time they are always in a 'fight' to stay relevant because things move fast.
Is a visual identity change a good idea in this situation? They seem to have done fine proving their relevance/freshness with their work over the years. Isn't this just a distraction?
On the other hand, they have a strong history of design successes too (personal bias). The Firefox logo and font are so beautiful.
As a stubborn Firefox user, and the user many of their products some positive critics: there are a lot of open source projects which do miracles with less than 1% of what Mozilla earns each year. I find, Mozilla as an organization to be slow, inefficient and lagging in innovation.
Mozilla can be more aggressive and productive:
* Being an umbrella for succesful open source consumer software
* Using kickstarter and other funding sites better
* by evangelizing and implementing more browser features in Firefox (HTML5 and beyond). Things like web components or whatever. Caniuse.com is a good place to see that Firefox is a lazy follower of Webkit/Blink leadership.
* Confronting Apple for not letting their rendering engines inside the app store.
* Giving up copying Chrome visual appearance in every new version.
* Focusing obsessively on performance (JS, rendering)
> There's none maintaining and improving a complete web engine though.
KDE used to maintain KHTML until a few years ago. I remember using it in 2008-2010 when it was a really solid, feature-complete web engine (even innovative at some points, e.g. it supported text-shadow long before Gecko). Then HTML 5 and ES 5 happened, and KHTML couldn't keep up anymore.
I remember when, in 2011, I met the KHTML developer. Singular, not plural. </storytime>
I love how much aliasing the star-shaped primary logo mark (Burst) has. As someone who cares about graphics, it pains me to just look at it. This is not good logo design in my opinion.
The problem with Protocol is they'll show themselves to the world as Moz://a and not how Mozilla. Destruction of the brand. Luckily people never see the Mozilla brand, only Firefox, so the damage will be limited and the geeks will know.
My first choice was #3 Burst. My reactions: #1 Horrible and not very readable, #2 Not so horrible but much less readable and brand damaging, #3 Normal people could like this, #4 Same as 3 but what's the meaning of that logo?
#1 - Looks pretty cool, oh wait, is the flame the /logo/? Looks like someones generic desktop background. First tutorial on Photoshop will give you this.
#2 - I seriously think this looks like someones first or second go at photoshop/paint. And wit the moire (?) pattern it is straight up repulsive.
#3 - Eh, generic and would exclude anyone who isn't a developer/techie. Not sure if this matters though, it's not like mozilla is consumer facing anyway.
#4 - Looks kinda neat, until they turned it into a freaking raptor..
In the beginning, Firefox was ultra fast. Now it is a slow beast and I am forced to use Chrome instead. Are they sure they are focusing on the right things?
> That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines?
The difference being that Samsung's repsective divisions are run as self-funding corporations. The Android development team in their bubble don't have any financial impact on the shipbuilding folks or the washing-machine QA teams.
In contrast Mozilla has essentially only one revenue flow, orders of magnitudes greater than the secondary flows. So every dollar that Mozilla spends on 'rebranding' or flailing around with The IoT is one dollar less for paying developers to fix Firefox bugs, or maintain Thunderbird or Persona or whatever.
Aside from Firefox itself all the things you mentioned got either canned or significantly downsized.
Note that Firefox is "owned" by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which is using it to generate funding for the things it considers important. Given that many of those involve activism, improving branding or messaging seems like a natural investment.
It's like whining that Samsung was spending money on their (then-irrelevant) SSD division at a time when their hard drives were starting to get pressured in the market.
When was the last time you used Firefox? They've put a ton of work into performance, which involved a serious rewrite. Current versions are now much faster than Chrome (for me).
A bit more technical: A big part of why it was so slow, is that the engine was written before tabs ever existed, before CSS and JS (both) became so heavy, and before computers had so much disposable RAM. It kept everything in a single process, on a single CPU.
The rewrite makes firefox multi-process and multi-CPU core capable. It makes the browser feel MUCH faster and lighter! The functionality is nicknamed Electrolysis or e10s, and they've been gradually rolling it out since March of this year. The work effected extensions in particular, so they have to roll out slowly. About 30% of the stable-release userbase has multi-process at this point, and they're just starting the follow up rollout enabling multi-core.
Give it a try! Try the firefox beta (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/) or better yet, Firefox Developer Edition. If you want to see the full speed improvement of multi-core, go to about:config and set services.sync.numClients to something higher than 1. (they're rolling out with a value of 2, and ultimately ending on 5).
However, I'm not sure what the goal is here? Even if you make a logo that the general public likes, they won't care about Mozilla any more. People care about Firefox. Firefox is the brand here. If they want more publicity towards the organization, they should just rename it to "Firefox Foundation" and put the Mozilla name to history.
Microsoft changed its logo to match Windows. Doesn't mean it no longer cares about its other products.
My impression with Mozilla for the last few years has been that their focus seems to keep wandering around. They invested in some major side-projects (Persona, Firefox OS) that didn't pan out, all while their best-known product continued to lose market share. Reaffirming their commitment to Firefox as the core of their platform, whether with their name or their logo, might actually help them gain more trust and credibility.
I was momentarily excited with their "Flame" proposal, for no other reason than that it reminded me of the tail of a certain familiar animal.
Mozilla's focus and the core of their platform is the open web. The products are tools to get there.
Firefox lost the majority of its market-share (and hence, influence of web standardization) to mobile devices, which necessitated Firefox OS. It was not a side project. They poured almost everything they had into it and still failed.
Whether they like it or not, the Firefox browser has always been, and still is, the most visible and widely used Mozilla product. From an outside point of view, everything else is a side project. Even Firefox OS has the word "Firefox" in it.
Maybe they should embrace the fact they they are a Firefox organization, instead of struggling to pivot into a brand that nobody is familiar with.
That flame logo is really weird, but the others are so bad that they make it look pretty good.
Why don't they test it against the old dinosaur [1] or the star [2]? OK, they probably already made up their mind and don't want that, but it would be honest to at least compare. The dinosaur mascot has much more character than every other option, and at least some brand-recognition (even if people don't recognize it, when given the name and the picture most people will say, yes this picture looks like "mozilla").
Another option would be to just drop Mozilla and rebrand as Firefox foundation...
Real apples often have worms and rot inside. Yet it's good enough for the world's most valuable brand. The whole point of using a symbol in branding is that you don't have to drag along every association that the real-world thing may have.
Mozilla's dinosaur was a powerful, happy fellow who is clearly not extinct at all. I always liked that as an image of how Mozilla is about defying expectations.
Every single one of these fucking horrible and Mozilla should be ashamed. What is this shit?
If they want to look like a rinky-dink "open-source" operation, go nuts, but I've seen personal projects with better logos sourced off of Fiverr.
Hire actual designers. Let them do their job. Mozilla, you're better than this.
Every design needs to consider context, and a top-level identity needs to be adaptable. Can you imagine these rendered onto a shirt? Onto a sticker on someone's laptop? How do you trim those anyway? What's with all the useless color?
Apparently I'm in the minority preferring the flame logo. I mean, it's not great, but it's considerably more polished and attractive than any of the other options IMO. (Not that a re-brand is necessary at all...) The flame makes sense, and has a subtle tie-in with Firefox. Instead apparently they're going to go with a geek pun that makes the name difficult to read? And the majority of people prefer this option?
I agree. Initially I didn't see that there are 4 different proposals and was quite happy with the flame. Then I scrolled down and couldn't believe my eyes...
It "needs work" like a person hit by a bus, thrown off a cliff, half drowned, and then during the rescue was accidentally set on fire needs medical attention.
It's insane. The protocol is a okay-ish as an idea, but form and colors are something from the 90ies.
The flames are actually quite appealing esthetically (you have to see them a bit larger to get this "point" effect). But, more importantly: it's a fantastically versatile idea. You could flow them around any shape, animations practically write themselves. Look at the country logos: they're distinct, yet clearly a family.
"Burst" is a bit meh... But I guess I could life with, considering I see the logo maybe once a week.
The "Protocol" design feels a bit too geeky for ordinary people who don't care what all://_the <symbols> mean, as well as a bit too cheap/amateurish for people who don't wear college jerseys anymore. Seriously, the Facebook screenshot looks like a page for a high school football team. Oh, and curl already played the :// trick with its new logo.
The dinosaur one looks like it was designed in the 90s.
The other two look more modern. Although I'm not a big fan of the "ultra-thin sans-serif font with random polygons on the side" fad, I could live with it if it means that more people will consider switching to Firefox.
It's a shame that the results have come out like this – from a design perspective, the 'burst' logo is bad. It doesn't scale or scroll well, it's indistinct in knockout and monochrome, it doesn't stand without the logotype, and it's far too fussy and detailed.
As ever, public feedback can be challenging to use constructively.
Is it just me, or are these designs terrible and the entire thing reeks of marketers inventing ways to justify their pay checks? The merchandise photos alone are cringe-worthy.
If you told me this was student work I would believe you, but its still not top-marks kind of student work. Its like they have never seen a logo before at all and instead are making a moodboard about what they hope the future of the internet should be. Cool art piece, but not a workhorse design you can use as a brand.
- "Flame" is probably my favorite aesthetically, but "random orange blob" is a pretty weak brand identifier, and the alternate logos seem unrelated unless you see them next to each other.
- "Burst" does not scale - at full size it reads "busy eyesore", then scales down to "unprofessional moiré" and finally to "confusing blur"
- "Protocol" is probably the strongest, but their own data shows it's unpopular with consumers, probably because the "code" aspect is alienating to non-tech folks
- "Dino" is cute but doesn't really communicate anything. I also did not register the main logo as "dinosaur face" until I saw the other designs - it just looked like the "O" was pushed up for no reason.
To me it's mostly too much belief in a paradigm, yielding this extensive work from absurd sources. Pleaes Mozilla, redirect these resources into firefox, they've been doing hard work with few funds for years, they deserve even more love.
Mozilla should just adopt the adorable libuv unirex[1][2] along with the project.
I have been following their identity redesign story from the beginning, and to be honest, all their designs are very generic and vague. Too complex to be called minimal, too dull to be called interesting. When polling they should just include an option like "I would like to see a different design".
That horn is incredibly phallic and sexist and the dinosaur looks angry and scary. Something as frightening and demeaning to women should never ever be considered.
On the other hand, the circle around the dinosaur is obviously a boob?
And those teeth.. Women AND men have teeth. Except new borns and very old people? It's an outrage. It's all about dicks and boobs but i demand a dinosaur with teeth only on the lower jaw in respect of the elderly and new born!
The politics really get in the way here. I prefer having the "cold", practical protocol logo instead of the "welcoming" burst that's just some ugly moire.
Seems like everyone just wants to push their activism on me these days.
As for alternatives, Pale Moon maybe? But they're very opinionated as well.
The logo is for Mozilla, the organization, not Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation has always been an activist organization, with a mission ("promote choice and innovation on the Internet") and it has had a Manifesto for at least a decade.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadAgain - design for usability, not to look "fresh"
This has nothing to do with "brand identity".
edit: Though I agree with the vague collective sentiment that they're slipping. Still, I would never feed Google.
Yes, in the exact inverse way I'd want a non-profit like Mozilla to work.
By the way, do you understand how marketing works? Mozilla is not a lifestyle or luxury brand, and nobody cares about those things in browsers.
Firefox got a huge market share back in early 2000-2010 because it had a good product -- not because of branding. Heck, it wasn't even an official Mozilla branded effort at the start, just a project by some community members.
http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2015/01/18-different-...
Is it possible you got used to the incorrect rendering or something? How do Edge and Safari look in comparison to you?
First of all, we're talking on the Mac, and with Retina display.
Second, "used to the incorrect rendering"? What's to be used? Firefox consistently has had not only less smooth font rendering, but also botched layouts and worse zoom behavior.
(Safari is pretty much close to Chrome. Edge, I don't use).
I know it doesn't really seem important, but a good visual identity can help make it clearer who is supporting particular projects – and for a positive community organisation like Mozilla that's probably a good thing.
I see you haven't used/been forced to use IE in a while :)
It's so sad they didn't go down that path and play to their strengths (openness/open source) and against the weaknesses of the other behemoths and instead decided to compete with android head on.
There's a dire need for a product like this with a lot of engineering muscle behind it (and not just because of snowden) just as there was for a real smartphone OS in 2007 that ordinary people could use.
- new tooling
- new project launches
- new git repos
- evangelism at conferences/meetups
- a rare article about their funds
My idea based on these sporadic encounters is that they are continuously on the forefront of innovation. They have their share of strong and important products/projects/tools, but at the same time they are always in a 'fight' to stay relevant because things move fast.
Is a visual identity change a good idea in this situation? They seem to have done fine proving their relevance/freshness with their work over the years. Isn't this just a distraction?
On the other hand, they have a strong history of design successes too (personal bias). The Firefox logo and font are so beautiful.
Mozilla can be more aggressive and productive:
* Being an umbrella for succesful open source consumer software
* Using kickstarter and other funding sites better
* by evangelizing and implementing more browser features in Firefox (HTML5 and beyond). Things like web components or whatever. Caniuse.com is a good place to see that Firefox is a lazy follower of Webkit/Blink leadership.
* Confronting Apple for not letting their rendering engines inside the app store.
* Giving up copying Chrome visual appearance in every new version.
* Focusing obsessively on performance (JS, rendering)
There's none maintaining and improving a complete web engine though.
I mean if you could do this on 1% of Mozilla's funds you'd have more Opera's. That's pre-Blink Opera's, mind you, because even they gave up on it.
KDE used to maintain KHTML until a few years ago. I remember using it in 2008-2010 when it was a really solid, feature-complete web engine (even innovative at some points, e.g. it supported text-shadow long before Gecko). Then HTML 5 and ES 5 happened, and KHTML couldn't keep up anymore.
I remember when, in 2011, I met the KHTML developer. Singular, not plural. </storytime>
"Brand identity"? I'm already thrown off.
My first choice was #3 Burst. My reactions: #1 Horrible and not very readable, #2 Not so horrible but much less readable and brand damaging, #3 Normal people could like this, #4 Same as 3 but what's the meaning of that logo?
#2 - I seriously think this looks like someones first or second go at photoshop/paint. And wit the moire (?) pattern it is straight up repulsive.
#3 - Eh, generic and would exclude anyone who isn't a developer/techie. Not sure if this matters though, it's not like mozilla is consumer facing anyway.
#4 - Looks kinda neat, until they turned it into a freaking raptor..
Programmers are surely not going to focus on this.
Mozilla has more than one team. The speed has nothing to do with the logo.
That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines?
Their washing machines are exploding, too.
The difference being that Samsung's repsective divisions are run as self-funding corporations. The Android development team in their bubble don't have any financial impact on the shipbuilding folks or the washing-machine QA teams.
In contrast Mozilla has essentially only one revenue flow, orders of magnitudes greater than the secondary flows. So every dollar that Mozilla spends on 'rebranding' or flailing around with The IoT is one dollar less for paying developers to fix Firefox bugs, or maintain Thunderbird or Persona or whatever.
Note that Firefox is "owned" by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which is using it to generate funding for the things it considers important. Given that many of those involve activism, improving branding or messaging seems like a natural investment.
It's like whining that Samsung was spending money on their (then-irrelevant) SSD division at a time when their hard drives were starting to get pressured in the market.
A bit more technical: A big part of why it was so slow, is that the engine was written before tabs ever existed, before CSS and JS (both) became so heavy, and before computers had so much disposable RAM. It kept everything in a single process, on a single CPU.
The rewrite makes firefox multi-process and multi-CPU core capable. It makes the browser feel MUCH faster and lighter! The functionality is nicknamed Electrolysis or e10s, and they've been gradually rolling it out since March of this year. The work effected extensions in particular, so they have to roll out slowly. About 30% of the stable-release userbase has multi-process at this point, and they're just starting the follow up rollout enabling multi-core.
Give it a try! Try the firefox beta (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/) or better yet, Firefox Developer Edition. If you want to see the full speed improvement of multi-core, go to about:config and set services.sync.numClients to something higher than 1. (they're rolling out with a value of 2, and ultimately ending on 5).
However, I'm not sure what the goal is here? Even if you make a logo that the general public likes, they won't care about Mozilla any more. People care about Firefox. Firefox is the brand here. If they want more publicity towards the organization, they should just rename it to "Firefox Foundation" and put the Mozilla name to history.
My impression with Mozilla for the last few years has been that their focus seems to keep wandering around. They invested in some major side-projects (Persona, Firefox OS) that didn't pan out, all while their best-known product continued to lose market share. Reaffirming their commitment to Firefox as the core of their platform, whether with their name or their logo, might actually help them gain more trust and credibility.
I was momentarily excited with their "Flame" proposal, for no other reason than that it reminded me of the tail of a certain familiar animal.
Firefox lost the majority of its market-share (and hence, influence of web standardization) to mobile devices, which necessitated Firefox OS. It was not a side project. They poured almost everything they had into it and still failed.
Maybe they should embrace the fact they they are a Firefox organization, instead of struggling to pivot into a brand that nobody is familiar with.
Why don't they test it against the old dinosaur [1] or the star [2]? OK, they probably already made up their mind and don't want that, but it would be honest to at least compare. The dinosaur mascot has much more character than every other option, and at least some brand-recognition (even if people don't recognize it, when given the name and the picture most people will say, yes this picture looks like "mozilla").
Another option would be to just drop Mozilla and rebrand as Firefox foundation...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/7/74/Mozilla_Found... [2] http://plaza.ufl.edu/darklite/Portfolio/Images/star.png
The developers are not the ones running this I'm sure but it gives some idea as to why.
I disagree. Dinosaurs are cool. Dinosaurs are what we like when we still have dreams.
Mozilla's dinosaur was a powerful, happy fellow who is clearly not extinct at all. I always liked that as an image of how Mozilla is about defying expectations.
If they want to look like a rinky-dink "open-source" operation, go nuts, but I've seen personal projects with better logos sourced off of Fiverr.
Hire actual designers. Let them do their job. Mozilla, you're better than this.
Every design needs to consider context, and a top-level identity needs to be adaptable. Can you imagine these rendered onto a shirt? Onto a sticker on someone's laptop? How do you trim those anyway? What's with all the useless color?
Everything here needs to be thrown into a fire.
https://www.bunsenlabs.org/
The flames are actually quite appealing esthetically (you have to see them a bit larger to get this "point" effect). But, more importantly: it's a fantastically versatile idea. You could flow them around any shape, animations practically write themselves. Look at the country logos: they're distinct, yet clearly a family.
"Burst" is a bit meh... But I guess I could life with, considering I see the logo maybe once a week.
The dinosaur one looks like it was designed in the 90s.
The other two look more modern. Although I'm not a big fan of the "ultra-thin sans-serif font with random polygons on the side" fad, I could live with it if it means that more people will consider switching to Firefox.
"Johnson Banks, the London-based brand identity agency, is our partner in this work."
Compared to the logo's they made before these are really shitty. I guess that's what you get if you design by committee. It reminds me of this quote:
"A camel is a horse designed by committee"
As ever, public feedback can be challenging to use constructively.
- "Flame" is probably my favorite aesthetically, but "random orange blob" is a pretty weak brand identifier, and the alternate logos seem unrelated unless you see them next to each other.
- "Burst" does not scale - at full size it reads "busy eyesore", then scales down to "unprofessional moiré" and finally to "confusing blur"
- "Protocol" is probably the strongest, but their own data shows it's unpopular with consumers, probably because the "code" aspect is alienating to non-tech folks
- "Dino" is cute but doesn't really communicate anything. I also did not register the main logo as "dinosaur face" until I saw the other designs - it just looked like the "O" was pushed up for no reason.
I have been following their identity redesign story from the beginning, and to be honest, all their designs are very generic and vague. Too complex to be called minimal, too dull to be called interesting. When polling they should just include an option like "I would like to see a different design".
1. http://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/_static/logo.png 2. http://libuv.org/images/libuv-bg.png
And those teeth.. Women AND men have teeth. Except new borns and very old people? It's an outrage. It's all about dicks and boobs but i demand a dinosaur with teeth only on the lower jaw in respect of the elderly and new born!
* Unique
* Appealing
* Innovative
* Trustworthy
Sounds good so far.
* Inclusive/Welcoming
Let's just take that at face value. Don't want to get political here.
* Activist
That's getting a little dodgy. I just want a browser, not a social movement.
* Opinionated
Okay... Ask HN: What's the most approachable Firefox fork (or other alternative)?
Seems like everyone just wants to push their activism on me these days.
As for alternatives, Pale Moon maybe? But they're very opinionated as well.
Lets start to be political or we all get rolled by the system eventualy. Eaten by the corp.
I kind of want a social movement.