They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo | Hacker News Reader

They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo

jwz.org

87 pointsMzHN27 comments

For those like me who get redirected based on the referrer, here's a web archive mirror: http://archive.is/UMMCx

Alternatively, you can copy-paste the address and open in a different window.

Great story. Sadly, by the time I got to know Firefox (and thus Mozilla) the dino logo just looked strange, and seeing the pictures like that it becomes clear why: You really need to make that your design to make it work. It shouldn't be the one small glimpse of the past.

See https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/ for some additional context. There is one small nod to the old design, but nothing picking it up. Or look like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ looks now. That's the note on the dino:

> The classic Mozilla dino head logo served as a symbol of the organization since our earliest days, but is now reserved for select uses and executions only. While you may still see it pop up on certain sites and campaigns, please use the Mozilla wordmark on all properties and materials instead.

A bit sad. A complete sovjet union dino mozilla with the current web design refinement would be awesome (^for some definition of awesome).

> select uses and executions only

Executions? I knew marketing speak was weird, but wow! Or do they actually have a sandlot out back with a post at one end and a firing squad at the other, with the great grinning glower of the red-star Mozilla presiding overall?

It would appear that the marketing killjoys complained about in the article are in full force at Mozilla again.

> Great story

Yes it is! I was previously unaware of the futurist-style mozilla.org branding, but very much aware of the "hippies and communists" smear on open source. jwz's branding response as explained here is sublime!

It's easy to forget how unremarkable the dino seemed at the time. Dino was very much a part of the image, and the site. For a lot of the early dino's and more backstory, see the artist's (Dave Titus) site[1]. He was still there when Netscape was mature[2]. Even the "Soviet" version seemed fitting at the time.

Going on the current progress of Mozilla's rebranding exercise[3] a reimagined Dino doesn't seem likely, and the Dino variation isn't great either. To digress I'm still unimpressed with the rebranding efforts.

[1] http://www.davetitus.com/mozilla/ [2] http://spectrumstudio.net/cmsimage/9184/large [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/nearly-there/

Maybe there's a reason, but why is this linked to webcache, and not jwz? Is this a common practice?

edit: on topic, liked the article, thank you.

Because if you link to jwz's site directly from HN, you'll get redirected to this :)

http://imgur.com/32R3qLv

Ahah nice.

JWZ doesn't like an HN referrer and serves an image instead of the content.

Wow that is really odd. You'd think HN would be his kind of crowd (or at least I would think that). Does he have something against YC?

I don't know if this counts as an explanation, but: https://twitter.com/jwz/status/665658171415859200

Look at Mozilla's manifesto [0] and compare that to what many YC companies are doing. It's all about centralization and commercial profit.

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I dunno if I'm representative of HN but I consider YC mostly orthogonal to HN. I don't care about what YC does, but I find the stories and comments of HN valuable regardless.

I think, according to jwz's tweets [0][1], he has a different opinion and sees HN as a community with a distinct ideology he does not want to have on his blog. Personally I I think he has a point there - whenever YC and politics is involved this community can become quite one-sided. See for instance the discussion about Thiel's donation to Trump.

[0] https://twitter.com/jwz/status/665658278509084673

[1] https://twitter.com/aaronbrethorst/status/657373602405154816

I would hesitate to use anything written by the current Mozilla Foundation as clues to what someone who left the organization in 1999 thinks.

Source of the 1999 date: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Currently it links directly to the article, which is unfortunate. Could an admin maybe change it (back?) to use a webcache or a url shortener?

(I know it is HN's policy to link only to the main URL, but I consider this referrer-sniffing to be a bug on jwz.org, or a failure condition like when the site is out of service due to traffic. In those cases, cache links are posted here frequently.)

When I clicked on the link, my browser was redirected to: http://imgur.com/32R3qLv

It seems there was too much traffic coming to jwz's site coming from HN.

Apparently, Jamie Zawinski has strong opinions about HN.

Copy and paste the URL to another tab. It's a redirect based on referer header.

hahaha thank you jwz for that imgur

He neglects to mention some points, which most people probably would get the wrong idea about if they read only his text: The first commonly-usable web browser (since it was written for then-common graphical Unix workstations, MacOS, Windows and Amiga) was actually NCSA Mosaic¹, written by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), commonly known as “Mosaic”, and was, like much of their other well-known software²³, released with source code under a non-commercial license. Netscape was a later company which was writing a proprietary web browser, and the name “Mozilla” was created because this new web browser was supposed to be a “Mosaic killer”; a “Godzilla” for Mosaic. It was supposed to stop people from using Mosaic and instead use this new proprietary program.

① https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

② Before the web, NCSA had released good free software versions of TELNET for various platforms.

③ NCSA also wrote and released a web server, which was later patched and re-patched by the Internet community so much that the project name was changed to “A patchy server”; i.e. “Apache”.

He's not talking about the first web browser commonly used by people with access to Unix workstations, which was basically nobody outside CS departments and industry. He's talking about the web browser that made the web a household word.

It's also kind of cool that you're arguing the history of Mozilla with the guy who wrote a whole lot of Mozilla. I am not in all respects a huge fan of jwz, and I often find his uncompromising style and go-fuck-yourself attitude grating, but it is a lot easier some days than others to understand why his web server is configured to bounce HN visitors to a picture of a testicle in an egg cup.

Mosaic ran on windows.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-033/USGS_3D/software/pcwindow/...

Mosaic was also for Windows, MacOS and Amiga, not only for Unix workstations. Also, I am not actually arguing with anything he wrote, but he neglects to mention some things, the omission of which would probably give people the wrong impression.

That people overwhelming switched to Netscape suggests there is some truth to the difference in usability.

He said, and I quote:

We built the world's first web browser that mattered. The first one that normal, everyday people could use. It was the browser that your parents used.

This is true. Mosaic may have been designed with the intent of being that browser, but it was not that browser. Netscape was.

Meanwhile, the uncontrollable reflex to run to the comment box and quibble for karma is a disease that's epidemic on HN and in our industry, and if any mod is reading this I'd support amending the site rules to find ways to stop rewarding it.

Also, consider limiting the number of replies to a given post - the way comments are dominated by the myriad replies and replies to replies to some irrelevant nitpick that through whatever dynamic ends up as the top comment is a source of endless irritation to me.

Wait - what have I done?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com