Nearly there
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
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.
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 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.
This has nothing to do with "brand identity".
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).
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-...
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.
- 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>
"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"
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.
I see you haven't used/been forced to use IE in a while :)
Again - design for usability, not to look "fresh"
* 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.
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!
I would love to know how the roadmap is decided on over at Mozilla. Everybody I talk to says "Nah, it's slow. I use Chrome". Yet they did never address it. Why?
This is "dom.ipc.processCount". My understanding is that it'll be defaulted to >1 in Nightly soonish. For most people it "just works".
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1207306
Yet they did never address it. Why?
E10s was in the works for several years (while people where whining about the user-visible stuff, like branding).
FWIW, give a try to Firefox with E10s, or better yet, firefox developer edition. I find it much faster than chrome.
Lets not forget that big part of what made chrome leader was branding. Even the idea that chrome is so fast was put into our heads using those expensive chrome lighting ads.
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.
"Brand identity"? I'm already thrown off.
I like the link between the flame logo and Firefox. It's certainly growing on me.
The Dino logo seems really playful though. Specially in the art work.
While typing this on Firefox mobile (just installed to reevaluate), I must use portrait mode for my keybpard to work, my on-screen nav buttons are not redrawing because my screen lock activated w/FF up causing a bug to manifest, and I'm only here on HN because the sites I intended to browse won't load or perform very poorly, one site linked from an article had a 1 min load time, and video plays at ~3fps on any site.) After I type this I'm returning to mobile Chromium, even though I hate Google. I feel like just throwing this phone at the moment. Some user experience.
Is a logo going to correct this? Same reasons I've evaluated and dismissed FF for years now.
That, and I am attached to the damn Firefox, they're killing my favorite software mascot of all time.
Heck, I'm done typing, I get a half second delay every time I backspace and my on-screen arrows which magically reappeared a second ago are behaving randomly (i.e., jumping right one word and one space when I hit hit left once.) T9 would have been easier. Off to remove блядь FF... Congrats on like half a logo design though Moz, I'm sure it will solve your problems, lol. Maybe try not letting your enemy choose the battles, push for usable and accessible standards that aren't designed to sell us more middleware and Enterprise Edition duct tape.
No. You should file bugs in Bugzilla, in this case with the phone model and which keyboard (3rd party or not), so we can investigate and fix. It obviously isn't supposed to behave that way.
That, and I am attached to the damn Firefox, they're killing my favorite software mascot of all time.
This logo is for Mozilla, not Firefox.
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..
If you want a data-driven decision, you trust the data, not your gut.
Here's the thing though -- they wanted people to get the visual pun in the typography, but they didn't. That's okay, because a part of a branding strategy is to educate the public about what your brand means.
You're surveying people on these abstract emotions associated with abstract shapes and letter headings, but really it's up to the organization to make itself known for those values. As you do work in the name of Mozilla, you remind people of the values of the org and the good that it does.
Spirals and fonts don't buy you trust, deeds do.
The bad part is that they shoul just hire someone very good since its the hardest kind of rebrand. Maybe the comunity should pick the design studio not do the actual design.
Direction 2 is the strongest in terms of execution, but it's like they googled "stock developer logo." It's literally something any developer-facing tech company anywhere could use. Nothing about it is unique to Mozilla.
Direction 1: The crocodile-looking thing seems to be an effort at modernizing the dinosaur mark, but it's just so bad (the mark without the mouth feels decent and unique, but once you add the mouth it's like a bad joke). Stylistically it feels like something HotBot would have done in 1998 down to the random caPitaL lEttEr treatment.
Design direction 4 is trying to capitalize on a really popular (but now dwindling) faceted/stained-glass "data" trend... it's already starting to look dated due to overuse, and on top of that is really poorly executed (blobby rabbit, anyone?).
Design Direction 3 is mind-numbingly literal, it's like the first idea from a Sophomore design student. Some of the supporting patterns where the mark is simplified and abstracted beyond the "M" start to look interesting — but the main "M" mark is muddled mess. Just look at the all-white example on a poster, it's almost objectively hideous.
I think their existing lower-case 'mozilla' type treatment is generally friendly and recognizable and there's nothing wrong with it — this exercise would be more interesting if they stuck with that and looked into more options to modernize the T-Rex... I could easily imagine mozilla as a "mascot" heavy brand in the same vein as Mailchimp (but maybe dialed back a tad in the cuteness factor).
Addendum: Look at the homepage for their design partner Johnson Banks (http://johnsonbanks.co.uk/), and look at the shirt in Option 2 — give me a break. You don't even have to go beyond a single degree of separation to see how generic that concept is.
Addendum 2: Holy shit, look at these other options their agency partner has explored — these have their own issues and would need a lot of refinement, but are infinitely more interesting than these posted options:
route B (very '90s and the 'mozilla' treatment is a bit too abstract, but I think it could be pushed to a really nice place): https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/design-route-b-the-conne...
route F (combining a few existing trends, but it's eye-catching, fun, and I'd like to see more of it): https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/design-route-f-the-impos...
I'm not sure if these options mean that Mozilla doesn't know who they are, or their agency partner doesn't know who they are — but it really seems like a brand lost in the woods.
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).
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?
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.
Their washing machines are exploding, too.
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.