Mozilla launches new brand identity | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla launches new brand identity

blog.mozilla.org

292 pointsdao-284 comments

I'm a bit disappointed. Mozilla makes a couple of great things (Firefox, Rust, MDN, ...). But in contrast to their products, I have a quite bad impression of their Foundation and/or Corporation. I don't know if it is warranted or not, but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions they get from Google for setting them as default search engine. Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff.

Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and impressions are important.

This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this.

What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was invented.

Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.

I think that a fair amount of people share your views. Some time ago I articulated [1] that I find that Mozilla has to appeal to three very different groups of people, and its efforts to appeal to one are met with disdain from the others.

To quote a portion of my post, these audiences are, in increasing order of vocalness:

[a] the impressionable; the next-wave of web user who has recently gotten online

[b] the alternative-seeker; the average web user who is uneasy with Google

[c] the idealist; the open web, open-source advocate

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161

It's interesting that you mention this here, as it seems to me that the Firefox and Mozilla brands do in fact try to appeal to different groups of people. I believe the Firefox brand caters for [a] while the Mozilla brand seems like a better fit for [c]. [b] seems to be somewhere in the middle...?

>the average web user who is uneasy with Google

Is this even a demographic? I really dislike Google. But I still use search (DDG just doesn't quite cut it for me). And Chrome for a few sites. And YouTube. And Android and Play Music, which gets my kids ad-free YouTube.

FF needs to be appealing by itself, not in contrast to Google, to succeed. Features like adblock on Android - that's powerful stuff.

>web user that just got online Is this much of a demographic in developed countries?

This is definitely a demographic. The browsers are both good enough products for many common user cases that something like this can dominate the consideration.

I like Google's products, the problem with Google is that keeping all of your eggs in a single basket is very unwise, especially given their potential for evil.

They can now control and mine your searches, the videos you view, the email you send and receive, your contacts list, your location, literally keeping track of where you've been, the mobile apps you use, your purchased eBooks, your music subscription, your browsing history, your chats, your cloud data, etc. The only thing they failed at is social networking.

I see many people placing so much trust in Google, but that's very foolish. Even if they behaved well until now, power inevitably corrupts and even if they kept your data safe, let's say for the sake of this argument, you don't know where that data will be tomorrow. Plus there are people that lost access to everything due to one of their automated processes that bans accounts based on weird heuristics, e.g. people getting banned from their email account because they've bought and sold a Pixel. How fucked up is that?

I must also say that even though I can forgive Mozilla for every one of their failures because they were in good faith, I cannot forgive Google for killing Google Reader in order to promote Google+.

So I would say that non-Google is definitely a feature. I use Firefox because I trust Mozilla more than Google, Apple or Microsoft, with the browser being the window to all my communications and secret desires. Of course, I still use other Google products, including Chrome and Android, though not full time, my work email is GSuite (personal is FastMail), etc.

Mozilla also has its own internal list of target user demographics

https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-no...

It might be interesting to compare that to your list.

The millions they are getting from Google are probably spent mostly on salaries, since developers are expensive and it takes big teams to build products like Firefox and do marketing for it. Saying that they "burn through millions" is mean spirited, since that's the cost of doing business in this industry. Plus they've earned those millions, so it's theirs to burn.

They also can't stand still, so they invest in experiments and R&D, much like how companies are doing. Most of those experiments are failures naturally, so they tried Firefox OS and failed, they tried Persona and failed, but that's what experimenting is, HN readers should understand that and without burning some money on that, you'll never build those projects that make a difference.

Reading your message again, I don't understand what's your problem with Mozilla. And why is Mozilla under so much pressure on HN, whereas companies such as Apple and Google are getting a free pass on how they spend their money and on moral issues? Is it because they are a non-profit? That's the only explanation that's reasonable for what is in my eyes a huge double standard.

> Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just "Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.

Except that Firefox per se isn't why I love supporting them. I'm supporting Mozilla because of their values and I use Firefox as my main browser because I trust Mozilla to protect my interests more than I trust others, not because Firefox is technically the best, because saying that at this point wouldn't be true.

They also can't stand still, so they invest in experiments and R&D, much like how companies are doing. Most of those experiments are failures naturally, so they tried Firefox OS and failed, they tried Persona and failed, but that's what experimenting is and without burning some money on that, you'll never build those projects that make a difference.

There is a reason those failed (lack of focus or any long-term plans are one).

Have we been reading the same HN?

I think people are critical of Mozilla because they are one of the few groups trying to build an open web and their constant back and forth and closing down projects has had some real effects on progress.

Also, the firing of Eich for political views will always be controversial.

Isn't closing down projects (that don't seem to be succeeding and are taking resources) exactly evidence of focus?

Eich wasn't fired. He quit because he felt Mozilla was put under too much pressure because of him. Ironic you should remark that given the point of the post you're replying to: he quit exactly because of the reason you are using as justification.

I wonder what will happen when it leaks out the new CEO voted for Trump/Hillary.

There are lots of people who believe that Persona, if properly integrated with browsers could have taken off. You can find old HN threads where people were begging them to do x y an z and it instead remained a neat but underutilized project.

FirefoxOS? Either commit to it or don't, but the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic.

Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.

the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic

This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market, key apps (hi WhatsApp!) had announced they would not port , and Google responded in force with Android One. It took enormous amounts of resources from Firefox development. Looks to me like they committed as far as they could without bringing the entire company under.

Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.

Mozilla Foundation people (i.e. not his employees) actually. But anyway, I hope this argument works for the president too.

> This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market

I had a toy firefox phone to play with that had potato level processing power. I was actually surprised by how smooth everything was, way better than android on way less hardware. Firefox seems to be the only browser optimized for portables.

Compared to what other companies are doing, Persona's source-code is open source [1] and you or others are free to continue that project if you think it makes a difference. As it happens Mozilla isn't under any obligation to you or anybody else to continue a project that is draining resources and given its open-source nature, if nobody picks it up, then I doubt its viability.

Firefox OS from an "open web" perspective, was primarily a vehicle to push for the standardization of web APIs needed for mobile devices. It has succeeded in doing that and many Firefox OS improvements are now incorporated into Firefox for Android. But given the complete dominance of Android on the low end, it would have been extremely foolish to continue it, as that would have been literally burning through cash. Consider that even Microsoft has failed spectacularly, given all their resources and experience in building operating systems.

> Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.

Wait, people are allowed to speak their own mind? Oh, the horror.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/persona

Thank you for keeping the Persona dream alive. It turns out that being open source wasn't sufficient for Persona to be able to be continued by a third party: we accidentally baked in some intractable centralization, and the code was too much of a mess. Moreover, I'm not sure that Persona's proposed architecture makes sense outside of a browser vendor.

I just gave a keynote on this exact subject at linux.conf.au; video should be online in a few hours somewhere under https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2017/videos?shelf_id.... The title is "Designing for Failure."

Mark Mayo on Persona: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465

"Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters."

1. In hindsight, I firmly believe that Persona's emphasis on browser integration was a red herring, and directly resulted in an architecture that was intractably centralized.

2. We committed massively to Firefox OS relative to our size and revenue.

And reaped some good memory efficiency in the process.

3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?

Respectfully, I'd rather not wade into that on HN. It's in the past, and there's a great deal of nuance that would be hard to convey here. I'm confident that Mozilla is in a good place today.

With respect to your first point, is this a catch-22 that might ever be solved? The place that is best capable of providing the right UX for something like SSO/identity management/authentication does seem to be the browser, yet even if it isn't a red herring (as you seem to think) it certainly doesn't seem at this point to be a path that can lead to success (just off the top of my head: Persona, Microsoft's first "Passport" attempt in the Windows 9x era, Microsoft's CardSpace in the Vista era) because it's obviously not enough for a browser to support it if websites don't support it...

It's possible that the FIDO Alliance, with enough support from large enterprises, will be able to compel browsers into implementing something native. Otherwise, it feels like anything in this space will need to bootstrap itself by, first and foremost, working on the Web without special consideration by browsers.

Hi Dan,

I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work.

Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.

> Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.

There was also the issue of at least one major website soft-blocking Firefox users in protest.

One dating site. And his own employees wanted him to stay.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722964 for lulz.

Andreas Gal and I were among those calling for Persona to be integrated into Firefox ASAP, for scaling leverage against Metcalfe's Law. We had frustrating, protracted arguments about it with Ben Adida. I found resistance to the idea to be based on ill-concealed fear and loathing of dealing with the Firefox codebase, and (possibly as a consequence, not cause) explicit preference for doing a JS "shim" library and promoting it to web developers in competition with FBConnect.

That worked about as well as you would expect.

Eventually, Mark Mayo got Firefox Accounts going, but it was non-federated. In truth so was Persona: Mozilla ran the only IdP of note. Also, prior to Accounts, the protocol seemed to fork in anti-federated ways, but to me that was just teething pain, to be overcome by further evolution.

The fatal problems were threefold:

1. Facebook had huge scale and even in 2011 (browserid days) it had already won.

2. The Persona team was averse to integrating into Firefox, for whatever client population "interop readiness" pressure that might have put on servers (Metcalfe's Law is a barrier to new protocol adoption).

3. Users don't grok federated identity. Relying party? (That's the first party, the site to which you're browsing with clear intent and understanding of its identity -- assuming you haven't been phished.) Identity provider? (What's this sketchy popup I get every week or so asking me to re-login to some third party?) The whole federated Rp/Idp/browser three-body problem is confusing and looks like some kind of hack, not just phishing but popup malware.

The initial centralized or under-federated situation to me was not fatal, but could have become so if problems 1-3 didn't doom the whole effort.

Firefox OS indeed suffered from slow and half-hearted commitment from July 2011 on. Not even half-hearted: at first, it was a pirate ship. The CEO told another exec that in previous jobs, someone would have been fired for launching it via a post to mozilla.dev.platform (even though drafts of that post had been discussed and vetted by all execs who were paying attention).

Don't get me wrong, even with aggressive resourcing from mid-2011, Firefox OS might not have made it. But half-hearted, slow-rolled "investment" was worse than either "do" or "do not". No half measures, as Mike in "Breaking Bad" taught.

None of my employees called for me to be fired. You're confusing six Mozilla Foundation employees with people who worked for me in the (arm's length, for profit subsidiary) Mozilla Corporation. See http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mozilla-employees-to... (which, typical of coverage at the time, fails to note those employees worked for an entirely separate org from the one I was CEO of).

Eich stepped down. There was so much pressure on him from the community that he had no choice. Mozilla isn't beholden to shareholders or profit there goal is more social in nature and they've built their entire marketing and strategy around being the open and democratised internet, Eich had no choice.

Companies like Google shut down projects every day, one of the differences is that Mozilla works in the open and isn't so secretive.

But, I do know former employees and the company overall is a mess, with some teams better than others. People say the same thing about Apple though.

> The millions they are getting from Google

Yahoo! (being bought by Verizon, still in progress).

Well what kind of things do you expect to hear about the corp/foundation itself? If you exclude info about their projects, then it seems almost tautological you're going to hear self referential stuff!

I've heard Mozilla's "politics" are very much different to what I prefer, but whatever. It doesn't leak into the end products. As long as they keep producing a browser that prevents Google Browser from taking over, they're a force of good. And Rust is amazing and probably life-changing for me, so that's two massive positive things they do.

As far as the logo, that "retro" dinosaur looked a bit outdated. I fully support them "burning" millions on branding if it means more people use Firefox. I use FF for "freedom" but that's a tough sell. Even technically inclined people I know use Chrome and don't wanna change because of freedom.

My only request would be for them to throw more weight behind Rust. The community and tech is amazing. But getting buy-in from clients to use Rust might benefit from knowing there's a "company" behind it. Maybe.

> My only request would be for them to throw more weight behind Rust. The community and tech is amazing. But getting buy-in from clients to use Rust might benefit from knowing there's a "company" behind it. Maybe.

I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure we employ most of the core Rust and Servo teams. We also pay for all the infrastructure costs for both projects (web hosting, crates.io, CI). Additionally we've also spent a lot of time engineering the Rust ecosystem to meet the needs of large projects like Firefox and Servo to ensure that it meets real-world needs.

One thing people need to keep in mind when saying "Mozilla should put more resources into X" is that we're not a very large company in the space we work in. We have something like 1,200 full-time equivalent employees and we ship software that competes with products from companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. We constantly have an outflow of employees who get offers for more money from larger companies, or who leave to join startups. We're well-funded, but we're not a public company not will we have an IPO, so it's hard to compete with stock options for the promise of big money. That doesn't matter to everyone, but it's hard to fault people for wanting it.

We don't always get everything right, but I think right now we're doing about the best we possibly can to fulfill our mission with the resources available.

I really like this redesign it's clever and interesting; it looks more modern to my eye and makes me realise that Moz://a are all about the web. It presents several ways in which the logo can be shortened and I had to go to the Mozilla site to look up what the old logo was. I'll remember this new one instantly.

The way of thinking in your comment is really common... let's look backwards, never modernise or improve things. Never make a considerably better Macbook Pro (in terms of design anyway), BBC website (thousands of users says every redesign is terrible and they want this back: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4832892.stm) or logo identity (I still rate the 2012 olympics logo - https://www.fastcodesign.com/1670429/the-surprisingly-smart-...). Let's keep everything the same or look backwards to see how we should move forward.

I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea why they get such a bad rap; the worst thing they have done is shutting down Persona IMO.

I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea why they get such a bad rap

The other movers in this space are for-profit corporations. Nobody's expecting anything of them. The resulting dread leads to unrealistic and even conflicting expectations for Mozilla.

Yeah, that's something that I absolutely hate about journalism, or well, rather our culture in general.

If for example Google does something bad, then that's no news worth reporting about. It's just business as usual. And people will even defend Google, saying that they are a company, they are supposed to do everything to maximize profits, even if what they do is just barely scraping along the borders of legality.

If instead Mozilla does something vaguely questionable, then most journalists will just leap at the opportunity to report about the innocent-thought Mozilla turning evil.

Looking at the video I must admit I was pretty meh'ed, but looking at it in use at http://www.mozilla.org (especially on mobile) I have to admit it works well.

> makes me realise that Moz://a are all about the web

Really? What else did you think they did?

Before seeing the new logo I thought they were building an AI to automate adding pointless, sarcastic comments to hacker news. Now I realise I was wrong...

>but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions they get from Google

Isn't the money from Yahoo now?

Yahoo was default when I installed Firefox on my phone, so it seems likely.

Predominantly, though it is based on your locale. Some folks (including en-US) get Yahoo, others Baidu, Yandex, or Google.

> Most of the time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding stuff.

Note that marketing is how they get the install base that Google pays for default searches for.

Not through marketing of mozilla, nobody cares about mozilla.

I care about Mozilla.

That sounds like a bug worth addressing.

> Note that marketing is how they get the install base

In which spatio-temporal continuum did it happen this way?

In the timeline where they fund a dozen 'protect the internet' campaigns, where they issue grants to a dozen open source projects, where they print up banners, stickers, websites, etc.

If you like, marketing is how they _keep_ their install base.

Shallow criticism like this is terribly irresponsible. Not only does the Mozilla Foundation function as a kind of foundation for the Internet in critical ways including their documentation being even more popular than W3C materials, but they have plenty of great offerings including L20n which may be one of the most powerful and usable localization frameworks available. Your comment might make sense as long as you never need to look up any documentation of Internet standards or translate content into other languages.

They could just as well had rebranded to ^^0>>://a

;-)

You forgot to change the "a" into "@".

This is an example of something that is neat on the surface but completely blows up in practice, after even a few moments of consideration.

First, what do you ask for in a query? Will some web sites choose to say “mozilla” and others “moz://a”, thereby splitting search traffic between the references?

Just typing something like “moz://a” (even in a comment post such as this) might cause some sites or scrub-analyzers to assume that the text represents a valid URL of type "moz" and try to make it clickable and resolve to that URL type. Bonus points for the first malware to figure out how to hijack the "moz" URL type.

What is their web site? Not "moz://a" but "https://www.mozilla.org". Can anyone even type "moz://a" or "https://moz://a"? Can’t wait for this to cause problems.

I'm one of the people that are confused and tried moz://a in chrome and firefox.

I feel like this should have been an easter-egg before they went live.

Easter egg coming soon, maybe?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=moz%3A%2F%2Fa

easter egg that won't work in any other browser, hence making it harder for people to find mozilla and switch.

I just can't even

When it saw it, I thought that perhaps they should change the configuration url from "about:" to "moz:".

Also, the new logo reminded me of Curl.

> after even a few moments of consideration

While your general point might be right, this is an unfair implication. They've gave it plenty of consideration, considered with many, many people, and did so all in the open: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

Just because 100 people agree to jump off a bridge, it doesn't mean it's a good idea!

https://xkcd.com/1170/

Did anybody point it out? I'm looking at https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/route-one-protocol-2-0/ and see nothing about url confusion.

There is concerns about the protocol being hidden in browsers these days, so non-technical people won't know what it references.

On the other hand, if people don't know what it references then there's no way people will be confused by it.

I think there is the fundamental problem with this logo.

Either people don't know about Mozilla in which case they probably don't care or don't understand the ://.

Or if they do know about Mozilla and having :// just looks lame.

We had a designer that proposed to use '|<' as the letter 'K' in our logo. Cause y'know we were a technology company... and y'know we write code...

We didn't use that designer.

This reminds me of when PayPal ran all those billboard ads for Braintree in the Bay Area. I can just imagine the meeting where the team decided how they were going to look:

   Product: "We need to engage more with our developer customers."
   Marketing: "What do developers have strong positive emotions about?"
   Product: "Our customer interviews suggest they like writing code."
   Design: "We'll do the billboards entirely in monospace."
   Marketing: "Brilliant."

It probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but monospace looks ugly and doesn't read very well to humans, especially from a distance. It's just a necessary evil to make sure indentation works properly. Actual developers instantly realize how silly it is to make it the prevailing visual feature on a billboard.

Especially when the copy doesn't even line up vertically. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0qaKcUCAAA-enL.jpg

I don't even think that's monospace.

It's not. The letters on subsequent lines don't match up.

That's because the spaces are not monospaced.

Yup. It isn't even monospace. It is someone's idea of what monospace looks like.

Incidentally, the first search result for "moz://a" from every search provider I tried was https://moz.com/, with https://www.mozilla.org nowhere in sight.

Yeah...not sure this is a great idea.

The best part is moz.com provides SEO/marketing services.

It is unfortunate marketing bs but I hope they would do something creative with this so called moz: protocol

https://github.com/mozilla/moz-handler/

The blog post was pretty clear that the text is actually "mozilla", it's just that the Zilla font has a ligature for "ill" that will display it as "://".

                             _  _        
                        _   / // /       
     _ __ ___   ___ ___(_) / // /_ _     
    | '_ ` _ \ / _ \_  /  / // / _` |    
    | | | | | | (_) / / _/ // / (_| |    
    |_| |_| |_|\___/___(_)//_/ \__,_|

When it looks like this, it isn't complete shit

moz://a.nfo

Wow - this is actually sort of cringey. Reminds me a lot of what aol tried to do several years ago; manufactured coolness. http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_gene...

Yep, plus the announcement makes it slightly harder to download Firefox. That seems like a bad idea to me.

Is anyone going to www.mozilla.org to download Firefox?

From time to time yes.

I thought I was supposed download from http://moz://a .

I couldn't download anything. /s(aracasm)

There has been a very long and public design process involved in this [1]. Some of the final contenders were not what I would have expected to see even considered [2].

I think it is good that Mozilla stuck to a geeky expression.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/ [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/

Very glad they skipped the Sauron-eye. Not sure how that even got as far along as it did.

This kind of seems like the best of a bunch of mediocre concepts. Instead of having a design agency do the logos and then selecting from them, it would have been interesting to take designs from the community - surely some more interesting designs would have been proposed.

It's OK to say "These all suck" rather than choosing the least crappy option.

I've been using Firefox since it's inception and the Communicator Suite before that. To me this just screams out as a plea for attention to the younger generations.

This is like some weird episode of Saved By The Bell where Mr Belding puts on jeans and a ball cap to try and fit in with Zach and Slater.

Okay, looking at the second link, I'm glad they went with the least horrible one out of the bunch, but the better decision still would have been not to use any of them.

The "eye" looks like either the Eye of Sauron (i.e. evil) or a stylized vagina (i.e. inappropriate).

The "connector" is cute but useless for branding because it becomes excessively generic.

The "open" looks like someone mixed a console icon with an insurance company's logo.

The "wireframe" is bland with weak typography.

The "impossible M" is appropriate for a conference but not a company. It also just doesn't work at smaller scales or with other colors.

The "flik flak" is not even a logo.

These aren't good designs for their purpose. The "moz://a" logo isn't good but it's vastly more appropriate than the rest of them.

Jeepers these comments are pessimistic. Am I the only one who actually likes what they went with? I think it's cool, does a good job of differentiating from MS, Google and Apple's respective styles, and reflects Mozilla's less "corporate" nature. There are some solid ideas in the other concepts as well (although I will admit some of them are a tad underdeveloped, and the all-seeing eye probably projects the wrong image).

I wonder if they've considered changing the name to something more marketable? Their firefox marketing has always been top notch but the mozilla stuff has always been pretty terrible.

Here's my proposal: rebrand as Firefox and use the Firefox logo.

That's actually the current state of affairs. Firefox, and Firefox-related products, hang out under the Firefox umbrella brand. Mozilla's policy, outreach, community, and education initiatives -- remember, Mozilla is a non-profit -- use the Mozilla brand.

Mozilla hasn't been a product brand for a long time.

Did they actually pay anyone for this stuff? It looks like the sort of thing 16-year-olds would come up with (including the one they actually chose). Very low level all around.

Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the best of their options. [0] I wish them the best of luck with their rebrand and hope they realize that they don't need to sink their limited funding into a redesign, but rather into making their main product( or products if you include Rust / Servo / pdf.js / Thunderbird) functional and efficient.

Making a product that offers something that others don't attracts the gravitas of power users that they're seemingly attempting to cater to with Dev Tools and Firefox Developer Edition.

I digress, best of luck to the Foundation!

[0] - https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/

> the new logo was by far the best of their options

The old logo was the least of their problems.

Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. There was nothing really recognizable about the dinosaur, nothing which people would connect to Mozilla, if they didn't already know the dinosaur anyways.

I believe he's referring to the old "mozilla" logotype logo.

Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing.

Good. Then drop the marketing and start doing something useful.

That was the link I was looking for. I agree, it was the best out of that selection.

I agree with the others on here, the dinosaur was the best.

Thanks for this. I'm annoyed, though - it looked less ridiculous in the thicker font they used in the competition. The new serif looks like crap.

> Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the best of their options

Honestly, they could just write "mozilla" or "m" in lower case in #f00 and move on. Firefox is getting pushed out by Chrome, which was arguably their most mass-market offering, so that cash would be better spent on tech, where flashy redesigns don't really matter.

> Firefox is getting pushed out by Chrome […] so that cash would be better spent on tech

I have to disagree. Chrome doesn’t push out Firefox because it’s better (which it’s not), but because of anticompetitive actions from Google and a multimillion dollar marketing effort, which included for months massive ad campaigns all over AdSense/AdWords.

Don't forget about the ad campaigns in the real world! There was a browser being advertised in the subway. Now way Mozilla could compete on that level of marketing.

> I have to disagree. Chrome doesn’t push out Firefox because it’s better...

Oh, I didn't mean that it was being pushed out because it was necessarily "worse tech", just that it's happening.

The only one of those logos that has a reasonable typeface is the 'Flik Flak' logo.

- 'The eye' has completely illegible lettering

- 'The connector' has a ugly 'i' that's out of alignment with the other letters and the 'z' and 'a' are ugly

- All the all capitals logos have so little personality

- I can't describe what I don't like about the 'Open Button' type face. Just that the Flik Flak one looks much cleaner.

- With 'Flik Flak' the spacing between the 'l's and around the dot of the 'i' are equal. The 'o' is a circle (just makes me think of SVG).

I guess though the Flik Flak font was just too boring for them. Too close to Helvetica - I guess is is just Helvetica with a modified 'o'

Even the slightly crazy logo they had to go 'Flik Flak' is growing on me, looks alright on t-shirts [1]. Reminds me of the indie game 'Monument Valley' [2]

  [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/design-route-g-flik-flak/
  [2]: http://monumentvalleygame.com/

I absolutely love it. 100 times better than the old one.

Before clicking I thought it would suck, like many other rebranding efforts I've seen semi-recently (see Yahoo!), but this looks really cool.

:// stands for internet/web, but it's also generic enough to work in other situations IMO.

Good job.

Seriously? ://

Well,.their logo isn't ://, it's Moz://a. I don't see a face, there.

moz://a looks cool. The :// sad-uninterested-disappointed face already has its own connotations.

Well, that or they've italicised the ill in their name for emphasis...

I'm neutral on the rebrand, but imho a rebrand needs to be accompanied by a restructure/refocus/resomething. Otherwise it's a pointless marketing exercise. The heyday of Mozilla was when it was the sole champion of a vendor neutral internet, competing with IE. That battle has long since been decided (spoiler alert: Chrome wins), but Mozilla is still fighting it, this time with Chrome as the enemy. It really needs to go find a new battle to fight. Persona is a great example of the kind of stuff that Mozilla should be focussed on - vendor neutral enablers of identity, payment, security, etc etc. Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project?

If we're going back in time, please bring back the original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:M...

> Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project?

Mozilla is a platinum-level sponsor of Let's Encrypt. https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/

> Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project?

...because it already was? The whole thing started as a collaboration between Mozilla and the EFF. Its success allowed Josh to spin it out into an independent organization, and focus on it full-time.

There are many other fronts that Mozilla is fighting on, just less visibly: WebAssembly, Rust, Daala/AOMedia, WebVR, etc.

Having lived through the first browser wars, I can think of few things more important for the safety and health of the Internet than a vibrant, competitive browser market. And with the progress being made on Servo and Quantum, I suspect conceding to Chrome would be premature.

Let's Encrypt was founded by a group including Mozilla, EFF, and the University of Michigan. Mozilla is also a platinum sponsor. So yes, it is a Mozilla project.

Source: I am a Mozilla employee and a board member of ISRG (which operates Let's Encrypt).

Are you suggesting that Mozilla should concede the browser to Chrome? I really don't think so. Firefox is as important now as it was when they were competing with Internet Explorer for market share.

Good lord it's atrocious. Either I see the :/ face or I consciously feel my brain strain to parse it in full because decades of web experience have taught me to ignore the left side of the :// unless I'm specifically interested in the security of the connection to the endpoint.

Using non-alphabetic characters in a logo requires a pretty careful execution. An old ISP here used to be Optus@Home. I could parse that fine because it was fairly balanced, relatively minimal and reads smoothly (say it out loud and it is perfectly pronouncable, so reading it in your head is similarly effortless).

In contrast, moz://a both looks weird (the / stand far higher than the alphabetic characters in most fonts, there's 3 letters on one side and 1 on the other), it's mentally taxing (how do I pronounce ://? oh wait, that's right, I need to parse it as 'ill' when reading it in my mind's voice. I also need to remember when focusing on it in isolation not to parse it as a smiley like decades of internet usage has conditioned me to. This is the same effect as when you see <3 in some maths/code and parse it as 'heart' rather than 'less than three') and it doesn't smoothly parse as a standalone thing like @ does as 'at'.

I really don't like it.

It doesn't speak to me.

The peppy music and over the top statements don't jive either, I consider mozilla to be a geek brand and everything in the video is feel-good overly generic stuff reminiscent of a poor startup intro video.

Then again, I'm not sure I'd do better. But I'm just saying.. doesn't speak to me about anything.

I happen to disagree with you despite perceiving the video itself much the same. I don't consider myself to be someone to whom peppy tribal drumbeat, bright neon colors, and fairly generic messages alluding to multiculturality and betterment of humankind appeal, but I can sympathize with their ambition of being known and perceived as an organization that champions causes with broader implications than just technical details.

The :// is a nice nod to nerddom and a tribute to its origins, but the rest of it tries to punch it out of its box of 'we write code and set standards and stuff' that increasingly hasn't been the whole story.

They need something that appeals to a broad, diverse group of people who may be tech-savvy but not have a background in tech, and whose lifestyles and futures are at stake in the power struggle for the open web. I think this is a rather good effort that works and is notably much, much better than any of the other options that were under consideration in their open process.

I never thought Mozilla's logo was a problem, but now I think moz://a is kind of cryptic and non-inviting.

To rephrase a game reviewer, it seems there is a stupid epidemic in Mozilla.

I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot like rebranding Yahoo.

I don't see how this compares to Yahoo, as Mozilla hasn't been a very strong brand to start with (as opposed to Firefox). I think the idea is to try to better establish it as a geeky brand next to the more consumer-oriented Firefox.

Also, in case you're referring to the Yahoo -> Altaba rebrand rather than a former Yahoo logo change: Mozilla is keeping its name. This is just about the logo.

I meant the logo change of Yahoo.

People who decide the company direction often do so based on their own past achievements.

So if you hire too many PR guys eventually someone will try to rebrand your corporate identity.

These days it seems that big name FOSS projects are overrun with "social"...

Being a non profit, their numbers are out there for anyone to examine. Go ahead and compare their development costs with their other costs - the board of directors in particular.

(not a popular opinion on HN, so goodbye useless digital karma).

Rebranding, when done correctly, can be a great way to regroup and focus on what's important about your business. You really need to stop looking at it as just a new design, and look at what philosophy it exudes. This constant visual reminder of what the company's mission is resonates downward much better than a mission statement, and how clients/customers interact with you.

This is of course if your rebrand was a success, and that's a very very difficult task dependent on all sorts of internal factors, that even the largest companies get wrong (see Gap, Uber, Pepsi). Don't listen to me though:

https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnv5iKB2hl4

I'm not sure the new branding accomplishes the goal, but it is a worthy one. If it helps persuade more people to support/use Mozilla's projects, it's a win.

Folks that care about the org wasting money, not keeping the retro dinosaur, folks that think branding is a waste - they probably already support Mozilla. No one's gonna switch to Chrome over this. Maybe if it's shown Mozilla is really actually wasting money like and mismanaging things, it might hurt their open source participation. Or if they publicly got super political.

I very much agree. While the new font itself would be progress in my opinion, the play with :// just seems forced and out of place to me. It also somehow doesn't feel very future proof.

I never thought Mozilla required a new brand identity, there wasn't anything wrong with the old one. As others said, Mozilla has been doing projects that seemed a bit off, like the phone OS.

Honestly they just need to focus on Firefox, Thunderbird, MDN, lobbying for a free Internet and help design open standards.

Mozilla has a great, trustworthy image, their management just needs to focus on the things Mozilla does well.

Heh... The irony of using Tim Berners-Lee's biggest regret - the :// - as the main logo element is quite amusing. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-...

Is there a reason they put old, dumb memes in some of their imagery?

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_...

They seem to be going the "internet hipster mememaster" route.

I winced.

Wow. Just... wow.

I think it's time to remove the Mozilla Foundation from the list of organizations I donate to. Apparently they've got enough money already, if blowing all these resources on this project is any indication.

I remember when they announced their "short list" of "concepts" several months ago and thinking then how terrible they were. This reeks of "design by committee" more than anything I've seen in recent times.

I believe this project was funded by the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), which is a separate, wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (MoFo). You can read more about MoFo at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/

Your donations go directly to, and stay within, the Foundation.

I think this is what pisses me off when I see these big redesigns from companies.

I am a front-end web developer who never wanted to be a front-end web developer. I wanted to be a designer (UX specifically). In order to get a job as a designer, you need a portfolio, preferably with shipped products. So I then create said portfolio to show of my designs (which I also developed because designs are nothing if they aren't implemented). However, with my fancy new portfolio (and still to this day), I can't seem to find me a design job, but I sure can find myself a front-end web position. I definitely would be happier in life if I was a designer.

So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job?

> So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a design job?

Because it faster and cheaper to pay one person to do both the design and the work to make it a reality.

There is also a supply and demand issue. Too many designers, not enough front-end devs (which is why you can easily find jobs as an employee)

if you want to be a designer only, I would suggest striking out on your own and hiring out for the work you dislike.

I have been working on a plan to make this happen. Soon hopefully! :)

good luck!

This looks very similar to the new curl logo[0]. I guess that must be intentional as Curl and Mozilla are fairly closely tied. Daniel the lead developer of Curl works at Mozilla. In any case I like it

0: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/

The :// is in fact identical, which is actually a bit weird.

They both use the symbols, but the design is not identical. The curl colon is high off the baseline, while the Mozilla colon is not.

That's bound to happen when a logo is based on something so core to the context.

The logo makes a whole lot of sense for curl, especially given curl's target market. The Mozilla logo is problematic, IMO, because of its target market (the entire Internet userbase) and the fact that the "://" is being used as a kind of l33t-speak for the letters of the brand name. Such an odd decision.

Never has it been more apparent that strong leadership is lacking at the Mozilla foundation. This looks like some interns at an ad agency got the chance to take the lead.

At least they are well-paid (by Yahoo (sigh)) and an army of well-meaning but out of touch contributors.

One side project occurred that you think is unnecessary. So that means there is no leadership? Is the person who designed this also setting technical direction or approving new software?

Corporate rebranding is a side project now?

And this identity is Wired from the late 1990s. Not far off: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/ from: http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-biopeep/skaggs-stopbiop...

It looks..interesting. WIRED got it right, though. I feel as if grandpa Mozilla got on iFunny and found some memes.

Yeah. The more I looked back at those old images, the more I realized how measured their use of unusual design was for solid effect.

it WAS cool not because it was, but because it wasn't, if that make sense

I'm curious - why the new identity was needed? And what benefits can it bring? Currently I lean towards the opinion that it's just a mismanagement (especially looking at the final effect). I hope it's not true, because we really need a healthy, independent and privacy concious organization that provides a trustworthy browser.

We're trying to bring Mozilla itself out from behind the shadow of Firefox, almost the inverse of when RIM renamed themselves Blackberry.

Confusing, especially with "Moz" being one of the bigger players in the SEO space. Google "moz://a", you're going to get mostly stuff about Moz.

Good luck dethroning an industry leader in SEO at... SEO.

My first reaction was to enter moz://a as a uri in Firefox but it didn't work. booo!

I can't stop seeing it as a URI.

Why "a"? They should've just had URI fun and rebranded as moz:// (pronounced "mahz")

moz://firefox

moz://thunderbird

the list goes on!

I guess you could have moz://a/firefox but why A? A disk drive?

As a Chrome user I saw it and imagined it as moz://a[ll_settings] similar to chrome://settings/

It would've been cool if something actually lived there.

I think they'd end up in a fight with the SEO/marketing company if they just went with moz://. I mean, moz://a is confusing enough as it is.

At first sight, the :// symbol made me think it was an alternate form of the :( emoticon.

Oh, visual identity. I was expecting some project similar to Persona.

That was my first thought too...

Not that my opinion matters, but just to document it: I at first thought this was a new project, something having to do with identity. I clicked, and saw some messy images like someone was playing in GIMP. I looked at the logo, and it wasn't a word, but it also made no technical sense. I tried to parse it, but it doesn't parse. This caused me to feel discord. Then I looked at the whole thing again, and said out loud, "What the fuck is that?"

Whatever it is, I don't like it. I didn't know Mozilla had an identity problem. I see at the top, the title, in all lower case is, "internet for people, not pr..." Hovering the title I see it's "not profit".

I'm sorry but that makes your identity worse to me. I remember the dinosaur looking head with "mozilla" wasn't particularly professional, but it didn't seem to matter. It was fine. This new one hurts my brain. The slogan sounds like something from a teenager trying to rebel. I don't even know what it means. Internet for people? That's what the internet is, for people. That tells me nothing about Mozilla, except that they don't want profit. Which makes it sound like they're going to fail, because that's not even a good attitude to have. You profit if you're producing value and sharing it with people in a fair way that people love.

This new identity seems to me like a grumpy uncool guy who is pissed he's uncool so decided his New Year's resolution was to change that. This is his makeover. His attempt to dress himself up and finally win the cool friends. But that tells me I wasn't enough as a friend. I've used Firefox forever. I never hated Mozilla, except I thought it was unfair when that CEO was forced to resign over his personal beliefs. I thought that was none of my business and nothing to do with the software. But I don't like words I c@n/t read. Micro$oft at least looks like a letter, please don't use s/ashes and co:ons in a w:0(o)r//d.

But whatever. Soon I'll go back to not caring like the dinosaur. I'll recognize it from the pattern and not try to read it. Nothing much will change. You are who you are, and a wardrobe and new attitude won't make you popular. But good luck.

The formal announcement is now live at https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/

I tried typing

www.moz:lla.org

in the browser but it didn't work. What am I doing wrong?

(I know what I'm doing wrong but not everyone would. Typing a brand's name in the browser in the hopes to get to their website is not illogical.)

You mistook the slashes ('/') for l's, try typing:

    www.moz://a.org

Does this work only in Firefox? What does it show?

The top DuckDuckGo result was the Museum of Modern Art (moma.org).

It's not a valid URL so it goes to the Google search? :-)

"a.org" is apparently owned by "AutismAwareness.com", which is poor planning on Mozilla's part. I wish to know more about this "moz" protocol.

You're right! Wait, this didn't work even more.

(It's a great day for moz.com, the first result in my region)

Humor aside, what a disaster. I love Mozilla so much, so a failure in any of its branding aspects is painful for me.

I'm wondering, is this caused by "smart people's blindness" -- the inability to see the world through the eyes of less educated individuals?

In this case, presuming that

* everyone knows how urls work and the role of slashes and semicolon

* everyone knows it's "mozilla" despite substituting letters for punctuation

But Mozilla is a large organization... how did they do a full rebranding without focus groups or at least showing it to a varied types of people.

Lastly, where's my dinosaur?

They did do focus groups, apparently your concern wasn't actually a problem: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

Can you point me to the part where they considered this issue and decided it's not a problem?

I looked at some of the blog posts but couldn't find this topic.

Using a variation of a well known smiley for "skeptical / meh" as your new logo ... interesting choice.

That's impossible to unsee now.

Thanks... ://

The "skeptical" angle fits the organization (and some part of its users) well, IMHO.

The funny thing is that it's not even a stretch. "://" can easily be read as an emphasised version of ":/" because repetition was (is?) sometimes used for strong emphasis in traditional emotes (e.g. :))), :(((, >>:( etc).

So "://" is basically "extremely meh".

http://** has been here a really long time without no-one complaining about it containing a «disappointed face» …

I like the new Mozilla logo! I realized it's a logo and didn't type it as a URL to see if anything would happen. But I'm not sure if people who're not familiar with Mozilla (compared to the larger number of people familiar with the Firefox name) would be able to read the logo and get which company it belongs to. That's the brand marketing part, and needs to be done strongly.

For all its faults, shortcomings and failures in certain experiments, I still love Mozilla and what it stands for!

They've tested it with "regular" people that fall into their target audience, so it probably works well enough for that.

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

This design looks really old-school and amateurish, like it should be a blinking marquee on Mozilla's first Geocities page. I personally like old-school techie nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that this sort of branding will backfire (assuming branding has any effect at all) for an organization that pushes "progress" in many ways.

From a recent Bugzilla entry: "REALLY ought to register 'moz' with IANA as well. Otherwise it might pop up as a 'real' protocol declaration in the future and we might have a conflict. We can just reserve the prefix so that it's not available for general use."

I hope they do this soon.

Alternatively, when a protocol "moz://" does pop up, they can just register the domain 'a'.

The favicon is almost identical to MSDN’s. https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico

Which, now that I think of it, has an identical name to MDN anyway. Oh well.

This blog post seems like a much better link to use:

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/

It's not very good. Very generic, too developer-centric. They had some interesting (mostly bad) options in their exploration and they ended up with something mediocre. I actually thought some of the best designs were cut the earliest in the process (which is typical for design by committee).

They'd almost be better served going with one of the worse options because at least it would have a bit more personality.

Open-source is great for a lot of things, but it's incredibly rare to find good design in open-source spaces. This doesn't change that.

This smacks of design for its own sake.

The problem is one of literalness.

Most designers (and many laypeople) will look at colon-forward-slash-forward-slash and easily see "ill," while many people who still type in URLs and use colons and forward slashes outside of sentences and they see those literal characters.

It wouldn't be a problem if so many of Mozilla's target users didn't fall into that second group.

This is a visual identity solution that is clever at first glance, and which seems especially clever to non-technologists, but shouldn't have made it all the way to market.

There's a series of gates similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that a visual design should progress. One of the first three gates, even for a logotype, should be usability.

It seems like the new Mozilla logo fails the usability test for enough core users to be a problem.

It's cool to see designers take chances. You live and learn.

I, personally, don't think their old identity was the thing holding them back, but new CMOs/CDOs love a visual rebranding. Nothing says this is now MY house more than a fresh coat of paint!

Well, people will just write Mozilla... because that's what they know, and a standard human doesn't want to learn. That's why they usually use FF for Firefox, although it's one word, and the official abbreviation is Fx.

Promoting this change will cost millions.

I hope this is not the same case, but when I was working on lots of places, and there was a manager who didn't have any results, he usually proposed things like this one. Useless, not needed, confusing clients, and extremely expensive. Then the upper management, who usually was not very technical, and couldn't understand our changelogs, was very happy with this change. Maybe because this was the only thing they could fully understand. This kind of change usually was something like: changing the name of the main product, the name of the company, or changing the official colors (which included a new logo, new website, lots of new printed materials). Did I say that this manager was promoted?

Am I missing something? They're not using it as the main icon in the header of their main website and rather only as a little one in their footer.[0] Is this not meant to be a big change from the status quo (which I thought was just fine and not stagnant)?

[0]: https://www.mozilla.org/

The video leaked ahead of the formal announcement (which is coming in the next hour or so).

They did a pretty terrible job of getting the logo dispersed across their entire website. Just visiting the About page will lead you back to the old header: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

The original is objectively better.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere on why you shouldn’t make design decisions a public matter.

Why is a graphic of a dinosaur objectively better?

Because they went extinct, duh!

Wait a minute...

I starter living the dinosaur a bit more when I learned about its history

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...

Pro-tip: don't click on this link. Instead, copy the URL and paste it into location bar.

Honestly, @dang, can we enforce that all links to jwz go through archive.org? Then everyone could see the content, jwz wouldn’t get the unwanted traffic, and people wouldn’t have to deal with "why did you just have a NSFW image open at work"

Would anybody mind to share the background story on this?

Now there’s a good story.

I should clarify, the logotype “mozilla” and not necessarily the dino logomark. The original is more legible, less cryptic.

They also based their new typeface Fira Sans off that original logotype, which is what they use to brand Firefox. So they also fragment that brand association.

This applies to more than just logos. So much design, when turned into a public matter, suffers.

I think you meant "subjectively" - if it were objectively better then you could surely provide some evidence!

I for one like the new logo - it's less staid, a bit more playful, and more indicative of Mozilla than the previous one (which was just the name rendered in some font). But that's a subjective opinion, and I'm not going to pretend there's an objective truth to it.

No reference to the fox? http://www.gagbar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f12...

Mozilla is feeling very corporate these days. Can you remember the time when we all chipped in so that they could get a full page advert for Firefox in the New York Times?

I think it would help if they had less money, so that they would focus more on their core product - a web browser.

I think Rust is the second best thing to come out of Mozilla and seemingly pretty far from what could be considered a core product (at least at conception time)

Good point. Rust is a good product and wouldn't have happened without them trying different things.

> I think it would help if they had less money

You have to be joking right? So as soon as an open community becomes well funded you hate on it. Seems like you are more interested in rooting for the underdog than actually succeeding with open source ideals.

Having too much money can drive you away from your core focus and lead you to waste time.

Not saying that's what's happening at Mozilla, but the OP isn't completely wrong in that criticism.

Can you remember the time when we all chipped in...I think it would help if they had less money

Mind = Blown.

Taking money for advertising and branding is OK if it's yours? I can get behind that, hahaha!

I think he means to highlight that a single newspaper advert was the entirety of Mozilla's marketing at that time and the product was revolutionary.

"Selected to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding, Zilla has a journalistic feel reinforcing our commitment to participate in conversations about key issues of Internet health."

When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?

Quite a long time before Windows got other monospace fonts.

> When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?

Oh boy, do we have a youngster here.

Back in the days. Before true type (freely scalable) fonts. When Windows was based on DOS.

Even the default console font in MS DOS was courier-like.

It's not a far fetched claim. It definitely shows long roots.

Also: Show source in Firefox uses (used?) Courier iirc.

* The default console font in MS-DOS wasn't Courier like. It comes from the video hardware.

* Here's a screenshot of Windows 1.0 showing the various fonts it ships with, you'll note the Terminal font is different from Courier. https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558 and in another video here https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154 -- you can see Windows 1.0 Notepad using non-Courier font.

* Here's Notepad for Windows 3.1 -- https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613

Perhaps you'll take a break from ageism and provide some better examples? FWIW, I'm about 2 years younger than you.

Anyone know where I can grab/download the font?

What can I say, I do like the font...and, yes, I'm one of those people who love courier and georgia-type fonts, hence my appreciation for this one.

Anyway, if anyone knows where i can grab the font files, please reply. Thanks!

It should be available in the next month as they finish off the brand guide. The partner type foundry is also expanding to include Cyrillic and Indic character sets.

Great, thanks!

The font is great. This is a situation where I think if they had just focused on a new font, the right font, it would have been perfect.

Instead, they pushed it too far in my opinion, with the overly clever glyph replacement.

This seems like the sort of thing that will be enshrined in epic design mistakes to me. Great font, should stop there, tries to embellish too much, goes overboard into confusing users.

I liked this identity quite a bit: http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html

moz://a is interesting imagery as a protocol. But I still don't understand how this is any different for them. I just see a new site.

Makes me think of an automobile manufacture saying, "We've switched all the gas and brake pedals with each other. You're gonna love it!"

It's easy to be critical, but from a branding, identity and especially aesthetic perspective, this is not very good.

That said, it doesn't matter very much - if the product is robust with good APIs + they are making the other strategic decisions they need to given their small market share, they will do ok.

That said, an exceptional consumer focused branding initiative could actually help them quite a lot.

I assume you're being downvoted because you said "it's easy to be critical" and then didn't go on to explain why you thought it wasn't good.

It's actually terrible.

The logo itself isn't so bad, but the rest of it is borderline disaster. The spot lacks originality, consistency, the creative quality is quite low.

I respect the notion of trying to mix images and forms that are obviously inconsistent with each other - but that's a hard/risky thing to do and they didn't pull it off. My god they have windows 'webdings' with arbitrary shapes, odd colour effects, smiley faces. The icons are inconsistent with each other.

The sequence from the 13 second mark to the 19 second mark is up there with the worst bits of 'professional' marketing collateral I've ever seen in any domain.

Even the music ... it sounds like the first thing a kid put together the first time he tried to make a rhythm sequence on garage band.

Here is a very similar sounding track (the fun/jungly rhythm line), well produced, which has a modern, fresh feel and would fit the narrative of whatever they were trying to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg

That track without the vocals would have been a good choice.

All of that before we get into the branding issues, and how consistently or poignantly it promotes Mozillas actual identity - there is absolutely nothing in that spot that directs you to what Mozilla is, or is trying to be.

Ask yourself: after you watched that, did you get any idea at all of what they were trying to say? Even from a creative perspective?

It's gibberish.

Even the copy:

"The internet it's at the heart of what we do"

"One idea link what we do"

"Mozilla Festival/Fest"

"Mozilla maker party"

"Mozilla all hands"

"Mozilla emerging technologies"

"And spans the world"

"It works both big and small and welcomes everyone"

"For people over profit"

"Champions for a healthy internet"

"Love the internet"

WTF?

It's almost random copy.

Here's what would have worked better:

Just the logo (which is decent).

A single tag line, like: "For the people" - which hints at the idea of open/non-profit and 'empowerment' without having intellectualize it, and modestly differentiates them from the 'other' browser brands.

A modern audio track, done by producers who know how to create a fresh sound, followed zooms and cuts of actual good apps in a mozilla browser.

Now wouldn't be particularly great, but it would be simple, clean, and at least not confusing.

That said it could have been saved with higher quality creative work.

Ironically, the site where they actually run down their branding effort, is itself, a pretty good branding exercise unto it's own: https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/

So that is 'being critical'. I don't like to be so negative, but this spot shouldn't have made it out.

Thanks for putting in words what I couldn't.

The logo is acceptable but not great. The video is awful and tells me nothing about what they do that I should care about beyond what everyone knows - Firefox.

The branding site has some really awesome edgy ideas that I'd have gotten behind. But I guess it's true what they say - you can't put lipstick on a pig.

Thank you for elaborating!

To be honest I'm not even sure what the point of the video is. There's a lack of context since Mozilla hasn't even announced the new logo yet in written form -- we can expect a blog post later today.

I perceived the video as a semi-official summary from the design team showing off their work, rather than as a Mozilla commercial.

http://www.mozilla.org

The "Mozilla Festival/Fest", "Mozilla maker party", and "Mozilla all hands" are not copy. They are examples of how to brand your Mozilla-related thing with the new logo. The new logo visually pulls all those events together. You can pretty much copy & paste from one of the examples, just replace the text with your new thing and be done.

> Ask yourself: after you watched that, did you get any idea at all of what they were trying to say? Even from a creative perspective?

Yes. It was fairly clear. "One idea links what we do" (despite you misspelling the copy in your own comment), it goes on to show how the branding can be used in it's various events and endeavors. The goal is to introduce the new brand, not Mozilla and all that it does.

Your solution doesn't solve that problem. For example, with the new brand, you ignore show how this works with All Hands[1], something you dismiss as "all hands." Already your "solution" fails at showing the branding at work.

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/All_Hands

It depends on what you want. This DIY-aesthetic - and I am not being cynical here - gives Mozilla a bit of a grass roots vibe. It could have an encouraging effect on people who like applying themselves at pragmatic organizations with flat structures (don't know if that actually is the case with Mozialla, mind you!)

this :// reminds me of :-/ or the shrug emoji. not really the happy face they are aiming for. OR did I misinterpret it?

This could just as well be a poster for some communist dorm room or antifa meetup: http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG

I saw the others designs that they had, they were all even worse than this. Somebody made a mistake by not firing that design firm and hiring somebody else.

Wait, what was wrong with their old branding? The new typeface is fine, but that :// is cringe-worthy.

Kewl, mozilla, very kewl.

The article makes me cringe hard. Browsing the page feels a tad better.

I don't associate Mozilla with anthropoligical notions of web. To me they ship open products that incarnates the values, not brand and aesthetics.

All in all I think it's 99% unnecessary and deviates attention from beautiful things like rust, mdn.

I like it, but all the rebranding doesn't matter until I see improvements in Firefox.

I think that Mozilla should just fork Chrome, fix the privacy for everyone and go home.

mozilla is just as bad as chrome now. Checkout all the call home URLs in about:config some time. There are dozens of features that are on by default calling home all the time. I tried to sanitize my phone once to save bandwidth, but ended up giving up and installing gnu icecat.

Will there be noticeable visual changes to Firefox as a result of the rebranding?

AFAIK this isn't going to affect the Firefox brand nor the Firefox UI. Coincidentally however there is a visual refresh planned for Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171

They really needed to lose the dinosaur, but this isn't an improvement.

The dinosaur was recognizable and unique, with a long history associated with the company. Why did it need to change?

To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton of money.

License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean, whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.

You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.

Isn't there already an internet company called moz? This just looks like moz followed by symbol swearing (#?*!).

https://moz.com/

I don't like it - it reminds me of bloomberg.com. OTOH, I've stopped using Firefox, so, really no voice in the matter anymore.

Best of luck to them.

So when you search for 'moz://a' you wind up hearing all about moz.com....

Old mate Randy is probably pretty stoked about this.

Not flashy, just text.

Thank God. This might age well, and it's as trivial as it gets to create a branded-button / link.

Think it looks decent, boringish logo offset by a nice little color scheme.

Won't be winning any awards, but eh

Is the logo gone? It wasn't gone a couple of hours ago

Is this public yet? I see that the video is still unlisted.

You can go to Mozilla website as it is used now on it.

when your product starts to significantly fall behind and/or decline in usability, performance and quality - rebrand. "Creative strategizing" and "concepting" - telltales sign of the environment there.

i dig the rebrand. it's oddly timeless.

With a side order of trying to cash-in/virtue-signal on "inclusion" (watch the carousel and read the tone of their landing page copy) as per recent blog posts and projects[1]. Mozilla's technology and their niche place in the internet ecosystem put them in the "hacker", in the traditional sense of the word, realm in (at least) my mind, where ideas matter and not identity politics -- this rebrand sells they idea that they're more focused on marketing and image than progress. Good luck folks, but you can keep your politics; my default is now suspicion of your content.

1) https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ (the text, source materials are a nightmare)

What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean? I see it thrown around all the time. It's such a vague and weird way to criticize something, but it seems to represent something that make a lot of people very upset.

I looked at the carousel images at mozilla.org and skimmed the article about anonymity to try to decipher what you mean, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Could you be more specific – what is the "virtue signal", and why is it so problematic?

Virtue signaling is term that had some scientific use but is mostly used online by people who don't like your morals, values, etc. Accuse you of doing if you display them at all in a public place. It's meant to be used to shut down anything but the most bland and status quo morality, by turning the simple act of showing any values at all into something nefarious instead something almost universal Someone says they want to hire more women, accuse of virtue signaling, rinse repeat. The thing is it works for literally any normative content.

Thanks. This makes me even more curious what were the values represented by the photos in the carousel, prompting mjolk to call them out as virtue signalling.

In isolation, the photos in the carousel would not lead me to believe that Mozilla is virtue signaling as the photos are just pictures of people. The aggregate message from their ad copy and the specific choice to use loaded terms is what made me aware that they wanted to employ this strategy.

However, to be cheeky, if you wanted to talk solely based on which photos passed editorial approval, compare those represented to the physical attributes of their leadership team: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/media-library/bios/

It's the libertarian right's version of "triggered"

Registered democrat and not at all a libertarian, but I appreciate your dismissive and disrespectful attitude. Thank you for your contribution.

> What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean?

As other people mentioned, it's an overused expression, but it's meant to call attention to an outward expression of a particular viewpoint or ideology, particularly with the aim of increasing the standing of an entity within a particular group.

> why is it so problematic?

Where it becomes "problematic" is when the need to communicate cohesion with a cause does so at the expense of reality or otherwise weakens a campaign. Whereas before I stood in unwavering support of Mozilla, their language now seeks to define their company as the crusader against the "others" who would seek a less "inclusive" or "respectful" internet, and coupled with their imagery, they, as a company, are communicating identity politics in those that they feel are underrepresented or deserve special attention based on physical attributes -- which goes counter to the "hacker" mentality against genetic fallacies/the ideal that an idea is more important than the physical attributes of the person that expressed it.

> What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean?

LMGTFY https://www.google.com/search?q=virtue+signalling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Virtual signaling is a public demonstration of values, but usually with the negative connotation of an ulterior motive to improve social standing and collect praise.

"Wearing your religion on your sleeve" is an older, similar expression.

I don't think this applies here.

"Greenwashing" is one common example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

It can also apply to anything that a culture considers virtuous or trendy, though.

You are suspicious because a tech company - which maintains the second-most-used browser in the world - wants to be more inclusive, as in, make people feel more comfortable with their products and community? That's pretty sad.

Any time any large company takes on a new emotional or social posture, there is legitimate concern that it's just pandering and manipulating for business motives not social ones, and has little to no actual value to the concerns of your supposition.

Also, Mozilla is a technology company, and the technology itself is mostly oblivious to social issues (unfamiliarity with UI metaphors being the most obvious barrier), so it comes across as a distraction in terms of effort, which is especially concerning to donors.

You're misunderstanding the suspicion in a way that makes me think that you already have a preconception of my worldview, which, in this case, is entirely inaccurate. You're painting this in a "either you agree with their marketing campaign and identity politics or you're against inclusion" way, which is the type of gross remnant this marketing strategy creates -- thank you for responding with example behavior.

FWIW, IE is the second-most used browser; Firefox is becoming less relevant. Maybe this campaign is meant to counter their downward trend in popularity of consumer-software, but it seems like they want to go into content creation/ideology.

No, but because they chose a big rebranding as the way to achieve those goals. At least that's how I read it.

That's not what I was asserting, but I agree with this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428958 and marked it off-topic.

We changed the url from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw, since HN generally prefers text to video.

I'm really appalled about how the foundation keeps burning money on frivolous stuff like this or Firefox OS* or Persona and on the other hand they killed Thunderbird and they have been unable to release a sandboxed Firefox or a fast Gecko.

* I consider Firefox OS to be a frivolous waste of money because Gecko is barely bearable on a mid-range desktop computer, how did they even think of putting it in a low-end ARM CPU?

I understand guys here don't like negativity like the one in this comment, but Mozilla being a company that asks for donations, I feel like I can complain about what they do with them.

Your donations were not used by Mozilla to develop Firefox OS or otherwise fund it. Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation which solely focuses on education and advocacy for an open internet. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/

Firefox OS development is not an active project. This has been the case for right around a year.

I see.

There's a clear shortage of engineers in Mozilla projects. Why isn't the money from donations used for that instead of political stuff?

If the guys over at Mozilla don't want to use the money for engineering purposes, I think they should stop asking for donations and tell people to donate to entirely political projects such as the EFF instead.

The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is.

> The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current situation is.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvemen...

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-nex...

https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a...

How does that change anything?

Do you have (multiprocess|sandbox) enabled for all users of all platforms and compatible with all addons?

For how many years have your competitors had that?

You're years behind, losing market share every month. You like to make it look like it's because Google is pushing Chrome with their money, but your product is simply inferior. And instead of getting engineers, you're wasting your money on political stuff.

The Mozilla project is dying a sad death.

> And instead of getting engineers, you're wasting your money on political stuff.

Mozilla has never been just about shipping a browser. That "political stuff" that you are so dismissive of is a core part of Mozilla's existence.

See the manifesto at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

Our "Stage 1" sandbox is out on Windows in version 50.

If you want to dislike us, fine, but at least do so for valid reasons.

meh...

hehe. clever.

design happened

Try explaining the now largely irrelevant portion of '://' URL syntax to someone unfamiliar. It's a struggle.

Considering that :// is not a protocol, how did you try to explain this? :>

Were you successful in explaining to him what a Google is?

Firefox Android, typed moz://a in the search bar, tap to search. Blank page, nothing happens.

Congratulations for the new brand. Much fashion, very SEO.

The same way a university is what a faculty becomes when it loses interest in its student, a brand is what an open source project becomes when it loses interests in its community.

That right there is genius! I'm adding it to my .sig file.

We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet.

I want to be known for not being snarky on the Internet. This is accomplished by doing, not announcing.

An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and innovate without barriers or limitations.

Warning: anyone who says it like this is probably going to do the exact opposite. What they mean is: anyone who does not disagree with us, is free to explore, discover, create, and innovate. The rest will be silenced as disruptive and harmful. Also commas are nice.

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