Curl hearts Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Curl hearts Mozilla

daniel.haxx.se

267 pointsolsgaard45 comments

> Also, when talking and comparing brands and their recognition and importance in a global sense, curl is of course nothing next to Mozilla.

You're too humble, Daniel. cURL might not be on the lips of of the general public as much as Mozilla/Firefox is, but curl is an important piece of code touching the lives of probably everybody, whether they know it or not.

i use curl everyday. i use Mozilla maybe once a month. its absolutely no contest which is more important to me

This is such a non issue that it didn't even warrant the blog post.

There was actually a HN comment thread on it for the Mozilla announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425609. The commenters mainly noted how similar the logos are. This could lead to possible confusion and I think pre-empting it is best to defuse any drama before it starts.

> how this could lead to possible confusion

I sincerely doubt it. There are two groups in the world:

Group A: What the hell is a Mozilla?

Group B: knows the difference between cURL and Mozilla

Agreed. I commented on the similarity earlier but I don't think there will ever really be confusion.

I think less people know about curl than mozilla, not to mention that curl has a logo (I had no idea).

Reading some of the stories about users finding mention of cURL in software acknowledgements and emailing for support makes me think that there is a Group C that could easily be confused

I think your Group C, "easily confused", probably has substantial overlap with Group A, "what is a Mozilla?".

But what about the third who may see a cURL logo after the new Mozilla logo and say, "oh, I didn't realize cURL was a Mozilla project."

What difference does it make?

Where bug reports go.

That's pretty funny.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

What about http://? Is it a Mozilla project, too? What a mess.

No one even knew curl had a logo until today. I'm guessing 80% of the people that use it have never been to the website.

Ironically I discovered it yesterday when using it to trigger outbound Twilio voice calls from a Windows desktop (for testing the local Lync client). The Windows binary has the logo.

(Off-topic, gotta change from ' to " for the example code to work on Windows. I should mention that to Twilio...)

I wasn't even aware that curl had a logo.

I wasn't aware that curl had a community or website. I always thought of it as just a command in my terminal. Guess my eyes are open just a little bit wider than yesterday.

You really need to listen to this podcast with Daniel on the Changelog. I love his attitude and his approach.

https://changelog.com/podcast/153

He'll listen to it right after the podcasts from the guys who made 'ls' and 'cd'.

Don't forget grepcast!

Same here. `curl(1)` is such a program that you use all the time on many different machines... without ever visiting the home page of the project. I think I saw that curl logo for the first time today...

Branding is very often an important issue to open source projects, contributors, organisations, and enthusiastic users. Emotions run high when we get things wrong, and rightly so -- people invest their lives in these worlds.

It's fantastic that Daniel thought ahead to make sure both communities were on the same page, and wrote this post to keep everyone informed and (hopefully) happy.

Nowadays outrage is all the rage, I guess communicating early and briefly could nip some minor drama in the bud. This doesn't seem likely, but you never know...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_%28database_server%29...

You'd think so, yeah, but I'm sure there's going to be some people who just want to be negative about it, and I'm glad that I have a link that I can smack those people with.

For prior art of using :// in branding, here's the IT consulting company I used to run in the early 2000's: https://www.sunesis.com.au/

They haven't changed their website since I sold out in 2003, quite an astonishing thing for a website.

You can see, though, that the graphic designer got a bit confused and reversed the order to //:. He insisted on leaving it that way because design reasons.

It just looks like a disapproval emoticon when it's backwards. Fitting.

"Our Strength in Web-Based Projects"

I think you mean ://

Thanks for that link, I was instantly transported back to 2002. I miss the internet of old.

> I'm Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of curl and employed by Mozilla.

Nice to see them making it clear that there's no conflict at all. Is it just me or does the "L" in curl's logo look too much like a "1"? I think a font with an "L" that's curved like an "S" would be more distinct and would match the monospaced look.

Better go register the `libcur1` package just in case

Wow, people are really hating on this in the comments. Makes me wonder, are there any examples of new brand identity that has been generally well received at first?

The big things I remember is Uber, Instagram, Google and Yahoo, and I don't remember those being followed by any nice words.

Looking back I consider both Google and Yahoo to have been an improvement. I'm on the fence about Instagram. Not sure if I like the new one, but also not sure if sticking with the old one would make the service look dated. I still think Uber is really bad.

People don't like change, and it's never been easier to talk about how much specific changes bother some people, and find others who agree with them. Meanwhile, people who don't really care what a logo looks like continue to say nothing as they used to.

Also the current Airbnb logo which is actually pretty awful.

What's the female form of phallic? Yonic? Phannic? Flappish?

TIL that curl _had_ a logo. I've been using it almost daily since quite a while... but apparently never visited the project website after the new logo / wordmark of curl.

BTW, Mozilla's logo is a bit smarter, by using the colon instead of an "i" and the slashes instead of two "l"s. In hindsight, they picked the right name in 1998 for this logo.

I'v read it as "hurts" and reading the article couldn't understand whether it was a sarcasm or what. Then I thought HN headline was wrong. Then I re-read it as hearts :)

I read the same :-D

curlill hearts moz

they're just trying what other ideas such as nations are already doing, it's called nationalism, well this is browseronism, they are asking us to love the browser, it's gonna be a little bit harder since we wasn't born in Mozillandia, that would help then you could tell people about their ancestors etc.

This is so romantic ;)

At least curl is not using symbols for leetspeak.

Until in 5 years, Mozilla sues Curl.

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