It's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon.
I'm just waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way when elaborate neo-rococo design lovingly handcrafted by neural networks and displayed in retina HDR will come into vogue. The world needs more birds and gold leaf.
It's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon.
It's kind of striking how bland the other icons are. I just did this exercise. I rapidly scrolled the article, and I can't tell what those other icons represent.
This may be off topic, but does anyone know where I can find more of these evolutionary branding changes? I’d love to read more and have tried to google, but wasn’t able to find a good list, thanks in advance!
Not personally a fan of the way they're (ab)using the browser brand for unrelated products, but it might help with recognition from your average person who doesn't know what Mozilla is.
Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla, so they're calling these all "Firefox XX"..
But Firefox doesn't have a brand as a generic set of utilities, it has a brand as a web browser, and this weakens that.
It reminds me of the articles about "Charging for Firefox" that were released earlier this week. If instead they had said "Mozilla is planning to offer a co-branded Mozilla VPN", it would have been clearer, and fewer people would have been confused about if the browser cost money.
Putting everything under the Firefox brand dilutes it to meaninglessness.
it's confusing only for us. for most people the browser is transparent. they say things like "should I click on google?" meaning the google chrome Icon. generally they will name the browser after whatever service is on the home page. that's the insight they are building upon
For non-tech people I'm not really sure that Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla.
"do you use google or mozilla?" (and it is not very surprising, desktop shortcuts are labeled 'Google Chrome', 'Mozilla Firefox' and they are just looking at first part)
Your name looks Dutch or maybe Afrikaans. I could imagine that in some places, the 'Mozilla' brand takes precedent for one reason or another. In the majority of the world, it's very clearly Firefox — when people install it, they search for Firefox.
Mozilla as the main brand is a relic of the late 90s/early 00s.
I guess the common thread is that these services complement your browsing experience, i.e. they'd often be used in conjunction with Firefox - as opposed to, say, Thunderbird. But yeah, the main reason is likely the stronger Firefox brand, and the biggest risk is indeed of weakening that brand. Then again, it could bolster it as well: Firefox Send is a very useful service, and can be used to make people familiar again with Firefox as the relevance of the browser has declined.
(The specific issue with the "Charging for Firefox" articles, was, I think, that the root source of that was an interview with a German website, causing details to be lost in translation.)
That's one aspect. The deeper problem though, is that all the other products offered under the firefox brand are revenue failures, and no one really uses them beyond those who already use the firefox browser anyway.
And that also explains the move. If they had a great second product, it would stand for itself, no matter the name.
This move is a desperate attempt of saving a product that is becoming increasingly meaningless (the browser).
- Firefox Monitor is simply a copy of HIBP, so no innovation here. It's a nice-to-have, and maybe would have it's use case if it was directly implemented inside the browser.
- Firefox Lockwise doesn't have many use cases, and apparently also not many users. It is hard to know what kind of product it wants to be, or what kind of problem it wants to solve, as it is no competition for the more well known password management tools.
- Firefox Send offers a quick way to send some files. Not bad, but already offered by countless competitors.
So basically all three products are simply nice-to-have gimmicks, they are no stand-alone products and they certainly don't need a branding.
They all have in common that in the current state you can't make any money with them, and Mozilla doesn't monetize them.
What they do instead, is use each of the above services to get people to register for a Firefox Account, in an attempt to bring people into the "Firefox ecosystem".
And this brings us to the problem with Mozilla. They want to be part of the big players, but they are just a 1000 employee company.
They will never establish an ecosystem.
They will never profit off the email addresses they collect with Send, Lockwise, and Monitor.
They will not be profitable with Pocket.
Everything they do to save their brand from going under is, at the moment, a money-losing business.
Ironically the only product that is indeed at least a stand-alone product, namely Pocket, is not included in the re-branding.
The products you mention are not meant to be money-makers. They all contribute to making internet users safe, which is part of Mozilla's mission.
- Firefox Monitor reaches more people to minimise the adverse effects of data leaks, and helps internet users to prevent them in the future. Potential further integration with Firefox will help make this usable by more people.
- Firefox Lockwise likewise can help getting the benefits of password managers to more people.
- Firefox Send offers a quick and private way to send some files.
They all also get people into the "Firefox ecosystem", reinforcing each other and giving Mozilla more leverage to help people be part of an open and accessible internet.
In the end, all they need to do is remain solvent while doing so - not make money. So far, their search engine deal is sufficient for that. Hopefully they'll find more ways to diversify their income streams, but that should never be the the sole criterium of whether or not to run a service or produce a product.
If the move is really not motivated by money, that would make it a very suicidal move, as this means the Foundation holds the Corporation hostage and uses the Corporation's long-term reputation to push products that no one really wants.
It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk for political moves of "keeping users safe", which I don't really know what it means, but the image that comes to mind is that of pre-school children being protected by overly protective helicopter parents.
I have long thought that Mozilla should essentially dissolve the Foundation, as the Foundation under Baker is abusing the work of the corporation. Unfortunately the Foundation holds all the power, which explains why Mozilla is behaving so erratically.
The CEO is basically reporting to the Foundation, so the people who work for the corporation have a boss that is not acting independent, but in the interests of a shadowy group of people who don't even interact with the employees. Most of the people managing the Foundation get enourmous salaries, while some of them only appear on site a couple of times a year when it comes to voting.
> this means the Foundation holds the Corporation hostage
It does; it's the sole owner.
> It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk
While I agree there might be a risk of diluting the brand, I wouldn't describe that as anything near "suicidal". In any case, the business exists to support the foundation, not the other way around. Mozilla shouldn't put its mission at risk for business moves of "making lots of money".
> which I don't really know what it means
In the case of Monitor and Lockwise: that their passwords do not get stolen or abused. In the case of Send: that their files are not stolen.
The weird thing is that Google did the same, somehow calling a "HDMI over Wifi" plug after their browser (huh?). I'll never understand these organizations.
Forcibly cute and overly friendly palette paired with soft and curvy lines is the exact opposite of what one would expect from an entity behind technically excellent pieces of precise software engineering. I usually don't have strong opinions on redesigns (unless something is poorly kerned), but this is completely, way off. Solid Dribbble material though. Peeps there will be ecstatic.
Do you think “technically excellent and precise software” is the core message they want to send?
The messages of “friendly” and “cute”/“soft” you derived from the new look are much bigger wins for a brand building their image around friendliness and safety.
But the only reason why Firefox enjoys its moderate surge in popularity right now is its technological excellence, not because it's "friendly".
Besides, there's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to look friendly. It's just they are overdoing it in a way that takes away from their tech cred. And they also chose to do it in a very cliche style. I wasn't kidding about Dribbble. The front page there has been choke-full of similar branding projects for months now. They all look the same.
We are the ones installing the thing on other peoples machines, though. If we say "you will use Firefox from now", then those people (mostly relatives) will be forced to do just that.
Why? As a power user I'm going to just about:config all the cuteness away, so why would I care what veneer of the week they come up with? However, for my family members who have to turn on a computer to check their email because they rarely even use one, that friendly palette and cuteness is exactly what you need to go "see? it's not all work work business boring nerd stuff".
If you're a power user, you have no opinion on this new set of icons: they're irrelevant, you're never going to see them, or use them.
To clarify my understanding from the article: the browser logo continues to be the full fox, but the wider brand logo is the thing that looks like a headless tail.
Yes, first you pretend to be a buisness, then you are a business, then you sell out. The dark side of the force knows many secrets, for example reviving past successes by selling your soul. Let the longing flow through you..
I don't give a shit about browser brands because it's sort of a joke by now. 20 years in, and nothing changes.
So Firefox is obviously a follower, not a leader.
Firefox has made a lot of meaningless choices, and more than a handful of choices I strongly disagreed with. Each and every time, you can read the tells of those choices, and quickly understand where Firefox is situated in terms of autonomy and authority. None and none on both.
This is pretty much the new Yahoo! logo all over again. Who cares?
How hard is it to support RSS? Why is about:config the only place where meaningful toggles like JavaScript:enabled live? Cookies and tracking protection is a total shit show of user interface confusion. Fuck Pocket. And no, I don't want any shit on my new tab page.
I understand that Netscape was the browser that tried to do too much. Firefox is approaching similar territory.
The browser only needs to do a few things. Some of them are actually quite difficult, such as video and graphics. The JavaScript interpretter is nothing to sniff at. Encryption and security is especially tough.
But at the core, broker HTTP requests and put powerful settings within easy reach, and don't show me fluff or preach to me.
Chrome fails at this. Microsoft fails at this. Apple fails at this. Firefox only succeeded a long time ago, when things were simpler. Since then, interlopers have introduced terrible ideas and needless destruction.
I love the Firefox icon, and thought it was the new icon for the browser. But then realized they have a separate "Firefox browser" icon instead - and I'm also not really seeing the connection between the four icons they're showing, other than a roughly similar color palette.
My suggestion: make the proposed "Firefox" brand icon the actual browser icon (because it's much, much better), and unify the rest of Mozilla development under a Mozilla brand instead of pushing Firefox up the chain to turn it into a brand.
I like both the Firefox and Firefox Browser icons. For myself, I'd be OK with the abstract Firefox icon becoming the browser's icon, but I worry that it wouldn't be as recognizable to someone scrolling through the app store. And I want other people to use Firefox, so that Mozilla has more resources for all their ventures.
The unified colorscheme of the logos does make it quite clear that the Firefox XYZ products fall under the Firefox umbrella. I thought that the inconsistency in shape looked off on the branding overview page, but what that page doesn't show is that these icons aren't going to appear next to one another all at the same size. And that makes the difference.
So the browser icon still has the Fox! I’m relieved and happy.
The rest of the icons look fine to me, though I do agree that using Firefox as the name for every service from Mozilla may dilute its value as well as cause some confusion for people who are vaguely familiar with Firefox the browser.
A total rewrite of Firefox for Android with the new GeckoView engine is going live soon. We have close to 1,000 engineers doing impactful work on things like engine development, Rust, WebAssembly, AV1, etc. Our designers are busy because design really matters to getting product into hands!
Except creating a fast browser that obeys web standards. I switched to an old fork of Firefox that's fast and now in maintenance mode. Works fantastic.
GeckoView is substantially faster than the old Gecko mobile engine, just like Quantum/Servo did for desktop. I don't know what web standards you think are missing.
There is an inverse relationship between quality of product and amount of advertising required, and this law is universal.
I, too, would be frantically rebranding and flooding the internet with positive messaging after I was so incompetent I broke the entire world's privacy addons and pretended it didn't happen.
To think they are using actual money from donations from people who want a private browser to stab all those people in the back with a cloud browser, yeah, people born yesterday, meet a fictitious legal entity run by a secret council of oligarchs.
Firefox is trying to to start offering paid services to diversify away from search. I'd guessing they're trying to unify there design iconography style for that.
I tend to not like it when companies transform the meaning of a popular brand into a more general, "parent" brand. Why would you intentionally make the meaning of a well-understood brand ambiguous?
In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
I think likewise. Even if they're willing to go to the huge effort to go through all their own documentation to make it tell the truth given the new definition of Firefox, third parties aren't going to.
I generally agree that that's a risk, but not a certainty. For example, I don't think many people have problems discerning Google Docs from Google Search - or at least, not many more than were it still called Writely.
The only successful example I can think of was RIM rebranding itself as Blackberry. There are probably a few others. Although they're likely all narrowing examples (company changes name to focus on single product) rather than widening ones like this.
It has always annoyed me that they call the product "Firefox" but the animal in the branding is a red fox and not a firefox. The firefox (aka red panda) is a totally different animal more closely related to a raccoon than to a fox. They look enough alike that it could easily have been an actual firefox in the logo but they go out of their way to give cues that it's a red fox.
I do think there's less risk in doing what everyone else is. It's like the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" of the design world. You don't have to be as good to get positive feedback on your design, too, because trend-following invites less scrutiny (not commenting on this log in particular, just general laziness/poor-talent that trend following fosters). You do something original, it better be good or you'll get crucified. Yet Another Flat Logo? Yeah, looks great, ship it.
Man, the comments here are vicious. I like it, the fox tail is pretty recognizable. And the firefox logo looks likes it's protecting the purple core, it's a bit softer. Can't say they made some stupid decisions regarding pocket last few years, but with design system it feels more like they are competing with the likes of google and facebook then just being the l33th4xor browser that is used by someone starting sentences with "Actually, ".
Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.
Firefox: the ongoing compromise and crapification of what started as a a very sensible and obvious idea - make a web browser that serves users rather than corporations and advertisers!
I honestly think there's a case for renaming Mozilla (the company) to Firefox (which is, I think, far better known). This has happened before to other companies (e.g. RIM and Panasonic come to mind) when the product name becomes better known than the manufacturer.
114 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadHopefully they'll at least appreciate the irony in a blog post positioning themselves as being about privacy.
Are you using any proxies, antivirus, etc that might interfere with your web traffic?
https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls
The Certificate is valid from August 31, 2019 2:31:34 PM to June 2, 2019 2:31:34 PM.
Potential issues with your system:
-- MITM attack?
-- Your antivirus is intercepting your browser traffic but doesn't have a valid certificate?
-- Invalid System time?
You could give us the error message you get instead of a generic comment on HN.
Begins On June 2, 2019
Ends on August 31, 2019
[1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.mozilla....
I'm just waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way when elaborate neo-rococo design lovingly handcrafted by neural networks and displayed in retina HDR will come into vogue. The world needs more birds and gold leaf.
It's kind of striking how bland the other icons are. I just did this exercise. I rapidly scrolled the article, and I can't tell what those other icons represent.
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932...
Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla, so they're calling these all "Firefox XX"..
But Firefox doesn't have a brand as a generic set of utilities, it has a brand as a web browser, and this weakens that.
It reminds me of the articles about "Charging for Firefox" that were released earlier this week. If instead they had said "Mozilla is planning to offer a co-branded Mozilla VPN", it would have been clearer, and fewer people would have been confused about if the browser cost money.
Putting everything under the Firefox brand dilutes it to meaninglessness.
"do you use google or mozilla?" (and it is not very surprising, desktop shortcuts are labeled 'Google Chrome', 'Mozilla Firefox' and they are just looking at first part)
Mozilla as the main brand is a relic of the late 90s/early 00s.
(The specific issue with the "Charging for Firefox" articles, was, I think, that the root source of that was an interview with a German website, causing details to be lost in translation.)
And that also explains the move. If they had a great second product, it would stand for itself, no matter the name.
This move is a desperate attempt of saving a product that is becoming increasingly meaningless (the browser).
- Firefox Monitor is simply a copy of HIBP, so no innovation here. It's a nice-to-have, and maybe would have it's use case if it was directly implemented inside the browser.
- Firefox Lockwise doesn't have many use cases, and apparently also not many users. It is hard to know what kind of product it wants to be, or what kind of problem it wants to solve, as it is no competition for the more well known password management tools.
- Firefox Send offers a quick way to send some files. Not bad, but already offered by countless competitors.
So basically all three products are simply nice-to-have gimmicks, they are no stand-alone products and they certainly don't need a branding.
They all have in common that in the current state you can't make any money with them, and Mozilla doesn't monetize them.
What they do instead, is use each of the above services to get people to register for a Firefox Account, in an attempt to bring people into the "Firefox ecosystem".
And this brings us to the problem with Mozilla. They want to be part of the big players, but they are just a 1000 employee company.
They will never establish an ecosystem.
They will never profit off the email addresses they collect with Send, Lockwise, and Monitor.
They will not be profitable with Pocket.
Everything they do to save their brand from going under is, at the moment, a money-losing business.
Ironically the only product that is indeed at least a stand-alone product, namely Pocket, is not included in the re-branding.
- Firefox Monitor reaches more people to minimise the adverse effects of data leaks, and helps internet users to prevent them in the future. Potential further integration with Firefox will help make this usable by more people.
- Firefox Lockwise likewise can help getting the benefits of password managers to more people.
- Firefox Send offers a quick and private way to send some files.
They all also get people into the "Firefox ecosystem", reinforcing each other and giving Mozilla more leverage to help people be part of an open and accessible internet.
In the end, all they need to do is remain solvent while doing so - not make money. So far, their search engine deal is sufficient for that. Hopefully they'll find more ways to diversify their income streams, but that should never be the the sole criterium of whether or not to run a service or produce a product.
It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk for political moves of "keeping users safe", which I don't really know what it means, but the image that comes to mind is that of pre-school children being protected by overly protective helicopter parents.
I have long thought that Mozilla should essentially dissolve the Foundation, as the Foundation under Baker is abusing the work of the corporation. Unfortunately the Foundation holds all the power, which explains why Mozilla is behaving so erratically.
The CEO is basically reporting to the Foundation, so the people who work for the corporation have a boss that is not acting independent, but in the interests of a shadowy group of people who don't even interact with the employees. Most of the people managing the Foundation get enourmous salaries, while some of them only appear on site a couple of times a year when it comes to voting.
It does; it's the sole owner.
> It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk
While I agree there might be a risk of diluting the brand, I wouldn't describe that as anything near "suicidal". In any case, the business exists to support the foundation, not the other way around. Mozilla shouldn't put its mission at risk for business moves of "making lots of money".
> which I don't really know what it means
In the case of Monitor and Lockwise: that their passwords do not get stolen or abused. In the case of Send: that their files are not stolen.
Horrible.
Forcibly cute and overly friendly palette paired with soft and curvy lines is the exact opposite of what one would expect from an entity behind technically excellent pieces of precise software engineering. I usually don't have strong opinions on redesigns (unless something is poorly kerned), but this is completely, way off. Solid Dribbble material though. Peeps there will be ecstatic.
The repulsion to anything “cute” is always perplexing to me. It comes up quite frequently when discussing branding and design.
The messages of “friendly” and “cute”/“soft” you derived from the new look are much bigger wins for a brand building their image around friendliness and safety.
But the only reason why Firefox enjoys its moderate surge in popularity right now is its technological excellence, not because it's "friendly".
Besides, there's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to look friendly. It's just they are overdoing it in a way that takes away from their tech cred. And they also chose to do it in a very cliche style. I wasn't kidding about Dribbble. The front page there has been choke-full of similar branding projects for months now. They all look the same.
HN users are not the majority of Firefox's users. We are not the entire target audience.
If you're a power user, you have no opinion on this new set of icons: they're irrelevant, you're never going to see them, or use them.
EDIT: the blog said the browser logo would be changed too, i figured to the same one as the parent logo. I didn't just skip over the article.
https://pasteboard.co/IiXKmDT.png
https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/modern-game-logos-ar...
So Firefox is obviously a follower, not a leader.
Firefox has made a lot of meaningless choices, and more than a handful of choices I strongly disagreed with. Each and every time, you can read the tells of those choices, and quickly understand where Firefox is situated in terms of autonomy and authority. None and none on both.
This is pretty much the new Yahoo! logo all over again. Who cares?
How hard is it to support RSS? Why is about:config the only place where meaningful toggles like JavaScript:enabled live? Cookies and tracking protection is a total shit show of user interface confusion. Fuck Pocket. And no, I don't want any shit on my new tab page.
I understand that Netscape was the browser that tried to do too much. Firefox is approaching similar territory.
The browser only needs to do a few things. Some of them are actually quite difficult, such as video and graphics. The JavaScript interpretter is nothing to sniff at. Encryption and security is especially tough.
But at the core, broker HTTP requests and put powerful settings within easy reach, and don't show me fluff or preach to me.
Chrome fails at this. Microsoft fails at this. Apple fails at this. Firefox only succeeded a long time ago, when things were simpler. Since then, interlopers have introduced terrible ideas and needless destruction.
My suggestion: make the proposed "Firefox" brand icon the actual browser icon (because it's much, much better), and unify the rest of Mozilla development under a Mozilla brand instead of pushing Firefox up the chain to turn it into a brand.
I thought I didn't like the other icons, but they look nice in context. See: https://i.imgur.com/Z4laxJy.png
The unified colorscheme of the logos does make it quite clear that the Firefox XYZ products fall under the Firefox umbrella. I thought that the inconsistency in shape looked off on the branding overview page, but what that page doesn't show is that these icons aren't going to appear next to one another all at the same size. And that makes the difference.
The rest of the icons look fine to me, though I do agree that using Firefox as the name for every service from Mozilla may dilute its value as well as cause some confusion for people who are vaguely familiar with Firefox the browser.
I don't recall what web standards I had in mind at the time I wrote my comment, sorry.
There are exactly 128 unique colors in the image.
I, too, would be frantically rebranding and flooding the internet with positive messaging after I was so incompetent I broke the entire world's privacy addons and pretended it didn't happen.
To think they are using actual money from donations from people who want a private browser to stab all those people in the back with a cloud browser, yeah, people born yesterday, meet a fictitious legal entity run by a secret council of oligarchs.
They start so helpful, they end so monstrous.
In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
I don't think it went well for Apache.
Now which of these guides describes the DI framework:
https://spring.io/guides
At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays: https://spring.io/projects
shrug
They all look so identical you would think its from one company and maybe even art director sketching all of these out.
What is happening in design departments? Do people ostracize you if try something different?
Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.