Make Firefox support moz://a | Hacker News Reader

Make Firefox support moz://a

bugzilla.mozilla.org

193 pointsLeoPanthera169 comments

While I don't like the branding move at all, I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous. Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast? No, because people aren't complete idiots. Those that are going to know/care about Mozilla will be able to tell it's a little web reference nestled inside the logo and that it still reads "Mozilla".

To be fair, I do insist on calling Deloitte "Deloitte Dot".

Also "the Kia Cee-apostrophe-dee" and "the VW Up-exclamation-mark". Not to mention "the Ferrari the Ferrari (sic)".

To be fair, those were specific examples of trying to be silly.

> No, because people aren't complete idiots.

Sweet summer child.

http://www.gentside.com/le-bon-coin/le-bon-coin-un-ordinateu...

http://i.imgur.com/4nMqG8C.png

http://www.jofogas.hu/veszprem/Sony_mio_laptop_elado_6040346...

http://archiwum.allegro.pl/oferta/sony-mio-pcg-6e1m-laptop-o...

https://www.olx.in/item/sony-wio-laptop-ID19koWZ.html

MOST people aren't complete idiots. Clarifying your logo isn't going to make the idiots suddenly smart.

Change languages and you're in a whole other world.

Have an Argentine (for example) pronounce Yosemite National Park for you.

Or for that matter, ask an English speaker to pronounce Habanero (there's no ñ) or someone from the East Coast to say Oregon or Puyallup.

While those are words and names, examples abound in marketing.

But to continue my example, Argentines already pronounce Mozilla differently than an English speaker, or other Spanish speakers for that matter! So this should be nothing new.

"Moh-see-jah"

I always got a kick how google/apple maps used to pronounce Sepulveda Blvd in Los Angeles. (Or almost any street name with a Spanish name)

Using stuff like Here Maps, Apple Maps (and probably Google Maps too) when driving around Argentina is a real laugh.

Puy = The same sound as the word "pew", like a church pew.

Allup = Al + Up. Like "Gallop" without the g.

Sequim is still my favorite Washington place :)

http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/pronounce-washington-nam...

Said "squim", FYI.

But now we're just reaching for absurdities. I live near Tooele, UT (too-il-uh), and my uncle lives in Hurricane, UT (her-i-ken).

I thought Hurricane was just pronounced "her-ken". Also: "creek" in UT is pronounced "crick".

That's not the Wikipedia pronunciation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane,_Utah ), but it's probably said that way too.

As an Argentina (born and living in AR), I can assure you we pronounce Mozilla almost identically. The Z might sound softer (like it does in "song"), but that's it.

The people from the above examples are just holding laptops upside down, there's no language involved there.

Tbh, SNSV is a perfectly valid reading for the first two. That one's just a shitty font.

And VAIO is a kinda poorly designed logo; you only know it's supposed to say VAIO because someone told you...

Easier to read if you know it stands for Video Audio Integrated Operation

This is still my favorite:

http://imgur.com/gallery/BZ9fPe1

Hah! That's a good one.

BTW, for context, I think that conversation took place in Singapore. "Challenger" is the name of a chain of computer megastores here. "Simi" is local slang for "What's up."

Hey, thanks for the context. I had wondered what Simi meant.

No problem. For reference, here's what Wikipedia [1] says:

"Si Mi - Hokkien - "What?" - From Hokkien term 甚物 (sím-mi̍h) (may also be written as 啥物 or 啥咪). Mandarin equivalent of 什么.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish_vocabulary

Not to mention dy.

http://s176.photobucket.com/user/trkraus/media/DSC_0103.jpg....

I used both snsv and Jade laptops, I think snsv is by far a better brand

The difference is that Verizon-Checkmark is clearly an invalid interpretation - the checkmark is obviously decorative.

Mozilla's new logo was chosen specifically due to the double meaning, the similarity between the symbols :// and the glyphs "ill".

The ambiguity is what makes it "clever", and it's kind of an in-joke that most non-tech people, who've never heard of "Mozilla" as such, won't immediately register. They'll read the characters literally and say "moz://a? Is that a new computer thing?"

I don't think that's an idiotic response at all.

This is a bad generic logo merely because it doesn't clearly communicate their company's identity in a unique and obvious way, which is the sole function of a logo in the first place. I could see this rendering appearing at some hacker events or on t-shirts, but IMO it makes no sense to use it as a generic logo.

I don't even want to think about the nightmare of accidentally rendering the string "moz://a" in a typeface that the lawyers consider too similar to that used in the logo.

Sure, people will almost definitely not call them "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a", but I could easily see a lot of people shortening the whole thing to just Moz. The :// in a url acts as a separator, so the important bits are whatever come before and after it. All there is after it is an "a" which isn't very informative, so my eyes are drawn to "moz" instead. Which isn't ideal because a company named Moz already exists and has no connection to Mozilla whatsoever.

Maybe less technical people who aren't used to seeing full urls won't have the same reaction, but in that case you've still got a problem because they probably won't already know who Mozilla is and it's kind of a leap to go from Moz://a to Mozilla without already knowing the name.

It took me until your post to see that : = i and // = ll.

I've known the Mozilla name for years. I guess I'm just too accustomed to seeing http://.

edit: Maybe other people see haiti's pill.

I am definitely old school, but if this (IMHO senseless) idea of reading "://" as "ill" would go on, a few sites might be read "the wrong way", as an example ;) silly combinator:

https://ycombinator.com

and silly ahoo.com:

https://yahoo.com

No, wait, the latter one doesn't sound too bad...

Who cares... Mozilla gets more and more irrelevant by the day. Since its clear the leadership is completely ineffective but someone manages to not be replaced, its pretty obvious Mozilla will continue its downward path.

In a real corporation this entire group would be replaced based on current and recent past performance. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

Such a shame.

EDIT: Not surprised to see people trying to censor my comment as opposed to addressing the dismal leadership that somehow avoids all accountability.

They need a new organization built from the ashes of the old.

it is better than "Mozzarella" or "Fox Fire" which I have heard numerous times

My mother still calls it Fox Fire and Newegg, "Egghead", although I think it's mostly to annoy me. It doesn't though, but I let her think it does because it's funny.

I've always interpreted Newegg's name as a reference to defunct egghead.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead_Software .

Yes but what is ne and what is a wegg?

Seems like you conflate idiocy with pre-existing exposure to a brand's proper spelling.

While I see the value of this sentiment, the brands you mentioned have branding efforts that so far overspend mozilla's that the comparison is barely relevant.

Also, typing www.mo://a.org in a browser presents a serious problem.

Full stops are allowed in schemes, so technically "www.moz" is a valid scheme name...

> Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast?

I think that a problem with all these examples is that, with the exception of "Johnson & Johnson" (where people do read '&' as it is commonly read, as 'and' rather than the name of the symbol), the decoration isn't, in fact, part of the name, so that people who ignore it correctly understand the name; whereas the decoration in moz://a is part of the name, and is not read as it would be in other contexts ('colon slash slash', back when people read full URLs aloud, slowly and awkwardly—remember those days?).

I read "mozza", then I "got" the web reference, and immediately disliked it. I don't really understand how moz://a is better than Mozilla, but I don't categorically oppose it either.

New branding is fine but the choice here is a bit more debatable than the examples you point out, where each of the brand names are spelled 100% with the alphabet. In OP, 3 characters in 7 are not letters.

Edit: Maybe Mozilla could have suggested an addition to UTF-8 and used that new stylized character "://"?

> I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous

Honestly, I'd be happier if someone called it "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwardslash-a" instead of calling it "moz-colon-backslash-backslash-a". I've seen so many people mix up slash (forward slash) and backslash!

I once had a student describe the "/" character by saying "You know, the backwards backslash".

I was unaware that it spelled out Mozilla until a news article explained it for me. Reading : as "i" is incredibly unnatural to me, and I still don't read it as Mozilla. I see it and parse it as "the company in charge of Firefox."

If asked to pronounce it, without news articles telling me to say "Mozilla", I'd be 100% uncertain of what to say.

Oftentimes when reading something with a lot of symbols in it, I just remove the symbols and pronounce it as if the name were a sentence. Quick example: writing emacs lisp, I see 'global-set-key' and think "Global set key", as if someone were reading it out. Thus the new name isn't moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a, which would be ridiculous, but 'Mozza', which is much more plausible but equally detrimental, eg the logo is still being misinterpreted.

Reading that article from Brand New someone posted further down, I found myself wondering briefly what "Dressed to K" meant... Maybe I just have "a complete lack of imagination or willingness to adapt" [0], but somehow I think it's not entirely my fault.

0: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo...

In case it helps now: K:// is supposed to be "kill".

If you're not a logo geek, this is the major website that reviews logo redesigns, on the new Mozilla logo:

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

Quote, to maybe nib the ritual hatred in the bud before mozilla becomes the new Apple:

"A logo that not only DOESN’T suck but one that has a strong idea, a fresh execution, a promising flexibility, and, that all of it together, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, manages to communicate what Mozilla is about."

Now if only someone would write an article explaining why considerations such as branding are useful even for non-profits...

edit: the last sentence was apparently interpreted as an actual question, when it was meant as a plea for someone to do an eloquent write-up of the non-profits-also-need-marketing case that I could link to.

Yes, on the whole they seemed to like it. Which isn't true of many of the redesigns they reviews.

Why are the branding needs of a non-profit organization any less than that of a for-profit organization?

They are not – the are, after all, operating in a few markets with basically the same mechanisms as any market. And the continued insistence of more or less any for-profit company (and non-profit, and government,...) shows that it's effective.

But it was a point repeatedly made in the other threads about this redesign – basically "they're wasting their/our/my money on useless stuff like this when what they need to do is make Firefox use less memory/faster/whatever...".

The general idea is that 90% of people I tell "I work for Mozilla" respond with "Oh, you work on Firefox?" but we're about so much more than that. My understanding of the motives behind this change is that having better branding that explains we're focused on the internet in general will hopefully expand our reach and recognition outside the tech bubble.

Sorry, I was being somewhat sarcastic (see edit). I know why it makes sense for Mozilla to do marketing, and I'm hoping for a bright future for you and your mission.

I'm not sure how a logo change begins to address that. I'm INSIDE the tech bubble, and apart from Firefox and Rust I can't name a single Mozilla project that isn't canceled (Persona, phones) or on its way there (Thunderbird).

If not Firefox, then what DO you work on at Mozilla then? I'm genuinely curious.

I didn't know Rust was Mozilla. I thought it was FF, TB, and "generic OSS projects like Apache but less well-known".

Yeah, Rust is a Mozilla project. Graydon worked at Mozilla, and them interested in taking it as an official project.

Why do you think Mozilla is using Rust so much? (See servo, pushing rust components into FF, etc) They're not exactly known for jumping onto new things...

> They're not exactly known for jumping onto new things...

Trying out new web technologies that are experimental doesn't count?

That's a bit weird. Where other than in a browser or something that will open your browser do most people see ://?

That's funny, 90% of people I told "I'm interning at Mozilla" gave me a blank stare until I added, "they make Firefox".

> but we're about so much more than that

And to fix that, you've made your name ungoogleable. Good job!

You need money to make the things the non-profit cares about, in this case, tools to have a free and open internet. Money pays for salaries of the people employed there; servers to build, test, and distribute software; office space; etc.

Actually, that review just underscores a problem I have with modern design, which is a focus on aesthetic elegance and cleverness over real usability concerns.

I love design, so I'm not meaning to bash design per se, but every field has its problems. With design, it's a lack of attention to usability as a scientific, empirical, psychological, cognitive, physiological sort of issue. There's too much of a focus on cleverness and theorized or actual aesthetics over real usability.

Design sits at this funny intersection of art and science, and it seems like too often the former is emphasized over the latter.

This design is a perfect example of this, and the review reinforces it. Where's the discussion of usability and confusion? When did they reach out to naive users and pose real-world use tasks involving the logo redesign? When did the review discuss this?

The logo redesign is great unless you acknowledge that it co-opts symbols that have real meaning and can be ambiguous in that regard. Mozilla was well-intended but failed.

To me, this whole discussion is a perfect example of the foibles of the design world.

> Actually, that review just underscores a problem I have with modern design, which is a focus on aesthetic elegance and cleverness over real usability concerns.

As a full-time designer who graduated from a fine arts college (read: least-user focused possible), this is completely false regarding what I and all my peers do.

Designers don't set out to be "clever" – we're not programmers, after all. We set out to solve a ritual problem of meaningfully conveying ideas and messages to a target audience, wide or narrow. The reasoning is pretty simple.

Readability (different from legibility) is an incredibly important part of designing with type, and your lede basically invalidated all else you have to say, especially as followed by "I love design."

really interesting to see how the comments there are largely positive while the ones here are largely negative.

One of the comments there makes a good point - they should really register `moz://` as a protocol, otherwise someone will grab that at some point and cause endless confusion.

On the other hand, "we used this for branding" is really not a great justification for registering a new protocol, is it...

It may not be the best reason, but aren't there already dozens of highly product-specific schemes in use? (such as steam:, unreal:, chrome: in Firefox, chrome: in Chrome - with completely different semantics -, view-source: etc etc)

Are any of those registered with the IANA?

Yep, though most of them are "provisional", which means it isn't a formal or permanent definition. Here's the full list:

https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xht...

Thank you for the link. I wouldn't have believes there are that many URI schemes in existence though...

They (Richard Barnes) did, according to the comments.

It's not any worse than registering google. TLD to be used for branding.

They registered it. That doesn't mean other browsers will implement it. In fact, if I were on Chrome or IE, I'd make sure "moz://a" either redirects to my own feature-page or leave it as it is (i.e. google search leading to shady SEO business moz.com).

Until now I didn't realize Mozilla changed their logo. Now I've seen it the typographer in me cries… The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information. So either Mozilla now rebrands themself as

moz-colon-slash-slash

or they now live with a significant portion of typography-anal nerds who dislike that logo.

> The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information

I don't know if its ironic that this sentence had a typo and some non-working markdown

Anyway, the purpose of text may be to unambiguously convey information, but the purpose of a logo is to look cool and be memorable

Fwiw, the Markdown works just fine. Hackernews doesn't support Markdown.

I'm not sure what you call this weird thing that HN does support.. but it's certainly not markdown.

markhalfdown? or... italics

> I'm not sure what you call this weird thing that HN does support.. but it's certainly not markdown.

Markaround.

There's been several front page articles about it over the last few days. It's a perfect bike shedding topic.

Logos fall more in the realm of graphic design rather than typography. They're an avatar thus logos don't necessarily need to be readable - albeit there is a modern trend to use the company name in an interesting typeface as their logo. However there are plenty of examples where a company logo contains no text what-so-ever - including Mozilla's previous logo[1]. So I wouldn't get too hung up on its typographic design. At least not unless Mozilla start using 'Moz://a' in normal correspondence. ;)

Personally I quite like it. It's memorable and well suited to the business they're best known for. Which is essentially the crux of a logo.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Mozilla_...)

You dont remember when people got confused and always called Mozilla 'red dinosaur head' because the logo was confusing?

This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name, they serve different purposes. Consider Indesit, they style their name but have a useful logo that can stand alone.

Mozilla could do with an actual logo, something that fits with the Thunderbird & Firefox logos.

Edit: Having looked at the other designs I think they chose correctly, but perhaps needed a "none of the above" option. This https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/#co... gets closer.

Perhaps they wanted something that worked just using text, I guess. Maybe 2017 will be the year of leet-speak on the desktop!?!

> This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name

Pretty much all the material about the redesign says this is, in fact, a logo.

I agree that the whole process was a complete clusterfuck. They picked the less atrocious suggestion. It's still terrible.

The problem is that there's nothing unambiguously non-typographic about the design. If they had distorted the symbols so much that they were outside the realm of normal unicode characters, sure. But anyone with that font could reconstruct the logo.

Stuff like this works when the glyphs are recognizable enough, but when the design is such that you simultaneously know that it is not to be interpreted literally. It fails here because the latter isn't clear.

So in this case it is typography. That's the problem.

Well maybe those self-proclaimed typography nerds could take this moment to collectively wonder how all these thousands of companies using fonts other than Helvetica could have fallen for amateurs telling them that fonts could convey emotions, that ambiguity could be artful, that art could have value, or that branding could shape perception.

I mean that one guy named his company "Virgin". How ambiguous is that? He'll have a learn a lot of things. And did you hear about the guys using an emoticon as their logo? Of like a fruit or something?

Good thing marketing doesn't work on me, or anybody else for that matter.

> The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information.

The purpose of text is to convey information, ambiguously or not. Text is a coherent and cohesive group of one or more sentences. A logo is not text, it is a graphic that represents an establishment or a brand. It may include some text, but it is as text as a photo of a road sign with some text on it is.

> Text is a coherent and cohesive group of one or more sentences

That would be prose¹ (and to some degree poetry).

Text² is an object that can be read. And by that definition…

> A logo is not text

… yes, a logo can be text.

----

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_(literary_theory)

Read better into your wikipedia articles. This is how your #2 continues:

> It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message.

>The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information.

I have a pile of novels (e.g. Faulkner, Philip K. Dick) that argue against this very narrow view of text.

You must hate calligraphy.

You're not going to like the curl logo either, then.

They go together really poorly. If Moz://a is the Mozilla logo then presumably Curl:// is the Curlill logo ... which it isn't, they follow different paradigms.

Does this mean that http:// is httpill? httpsill ftpill ircill sshill

Good ideas for some http processing libraries. We already have httpotion and httpoison for Elixir and httparty for Ruby. A pill has its place between them.

Seriously, I disliked all 4 logos that made to Mozilla's shortlist. Moz://a wasn't the worst one graphically, but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right. However I'll keep using Firefox. Hopefully they won't waste many energies into this bug.

> but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right.

they're not changing the name. they're still "mozilla". they will still have "mozilla.org" and you'll still be able to google it. it's just a new logo. people are so over-reacting to this

Imagine how they would react if Mozilla changed their logo to some non-font design?

"What are we supposed to call them now? Circle? Circle square-rectangle? What is the world coming to, why would they call themselves Circle!"

Non-font designs don't have these problems. Mercedes' three pointed star logo doesn't leave anybody puzzled about the spelling of their name. They have to ask for the name, then it's easy. Letters induce people thinking that the name of the company is what they see in the logo. Imagine you know about a new company from its logo C0mp4ny. I think everybody would assume that the name of the company is C0mp4ny, not Company.

That's actually a great idea for how to dictate urls over the phone, I'm adopting it to whenever I need to dicatate a url to someone who doesn't know that URLs start with an implied "httpill" but is familiar with mozilla's logo. erm.

One protocol to rule them all.

kimjong://

And the new musical protocol: runtotheh://

This is the only network protocol used in Best Korea.

I'm looking forward to the Beastie Boys rereleasing their album as licence2://

One tiny detail I noticed -

I hadn't been aware of the new logo until today, so I didn't have any context for what "moz://a" might mean.

After googling about it, and seeing the new logo, I realize that, in the logo, the bottom of the colon, and the bottom of the slashes, lines up with the bottom of the rest of the text.

Conversely, in my system's default font, the colon rises a bit above the bottom of the line, and the slashes descend below it.

When I saw the new logo, I at least was able to read 'mozilla' without squinting, and without confusion, while also seeing the double-meaning of 'moz://a'.

Such a terrible idea... this will generate endless confusion for no gain at all.

I don't think people will care too much. It's not like Firefox is changing name or something.

How will it create confusion? Nobody types moz:// in regular usage, so this only effects you if you are specifically looking for an easter egg or something.

I didn't think to type moz:// but I'm starting to read "moz" instead of "mozilla" now.

Same here, although perhaps that's because for some unknown reason internally I've always said dot-dot-slash-slash for :// so it's odd trying to read it as 'ill'. I don't expect the protocol logo will appear in print form in text very often though so it's not an issue.

The guys from moz.com will be happy about that.

In the comments, JR Conlin:

"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. "

But it's just marketing. Marketing "decisions" change all the time, and the approaches are discarded forever.

And we all have one more technical debt.

Let the marketoids do what they do, just keep them as away as possible.

You don't think at the very least older people will see Moz://a and try to type that into the browser's address bar?

Also, Moz.com should expect a huge increase in its revenues soon. I imagine they already have the celebration party planned for the weekend.

I don't think older people know/care about Mozilla. Hell these days I'm not sure younger people do either, unfortunately.

In other words, how does this logo help to generate interest in the company Mozilla, then?

If the goal wasn't to generate interest in the company, what was the goal?

> Also, Moz.com should expect a huge increase in its revenues soon.

How so? People "savvy" enough to type "moz://a" on a search bar aren't the same type of people interested in the services of a SEO company.

The opposite might well be true: people believing seo is a real thing tend to be the unsavvy ones.

Moz.com should throw a party.

It does tend to bork the unified search bar.

Sunk cost fallacy in action right from the start.

This is why you always have a disclaimer allowing editorial discretion when doing anything crowd based.

Indeed. And on the code side, implementing this gimmick involves 115 lines of new code across 9 files.

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/105654/diff/1#index_header

Half of those changes are actually just tests that it works correctly The first three files are the only ones that are doing any useful work, and then the last one makes sure that it works in anything other than a local build.

1 LOC is 1 LOC to be maintained, be it test or otherwise.

Note that the logo's rendering does not change the name's spelling. It's still "Mozilla", in the same way that it's Apple (not [apple emoticon]), and Google, not <blue>G</blue><red>o</red><yellow>o</yellow>...

Nobody expects to be able to type an apple-symbol, or for colors to have any meaning.

But if Apple changed their branding so that their logo was just "App/e" written out, wouldn't you expect people to type that out?

Actually, wait, we don't have to imagine. What about the Apple ][, or the Apple //e?

It wasn't my favorite concept at first, but after they refined it to what it is now, I am honestly in awe. I thought the process was bold and refreshing to begin with, but the fact that they arrived at such an excellent identity makes it all the more amazing. The fact that the logo incorporates a URL scheme is genius and perfect. The new zilla font is dope too.

It's a cool concept - but surely there are a lot of regexps our there that will now trigger in vain.

Also search engines will index "moz://a" as a different thing than "mozilla". Likely, the first will be indexed as ["moz", ":", "/", "/", "a"] and the punctuation likely be thrown out, resulting in matches for "moz" and "a".

Because search engines are using Firefox, right? This is an easter egg within the Firefox web browser. No search engine is going to notice a thing.

No, the issue is the new logo is "moz://a", so when people don't get that it's supposed to mean "mozilla" they'll type it in as "moz://a".

only people who don't know how to use the internet will do that

Isn't that a lot of people?

Most people, more like.

If they're seeing Mozilla logo somewhere, they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage regarding Mozilla or a product thereof, so all this discussion is in vain and is a parody of itself.

Also, WRT indexing, the logo is an image, not text, so the search engines will either not index it or index it like they index other images, using filename and maybe embedded metadata.

> they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage

or they've seen a sticker on a laptop. Or they've seen a t-shirt, or skimmed a magazine article. And they're now googling it, and ending up on moz.com.

It feels just like a scene from Silicon Valley.

A proper needle in a haystack situation here.

Why would a search engine index something that is just a local easter egg in the client software? It's not a real protocol, it will definitely redirect to an http website.

It is, however, a valid observation for the use of the string within text. It likely means every search engine needs to now add another exception to their parser to treat moz://a as a word entity.

I think y'all are overthinking this. Mozilla is not changing their name to "Moz://a". It's a logo, that's it. No one has said "Moz://a" is going to be used in text.

If someone actually links to moz://a, some crawlers might pick it up. But as a crawler has to parse the url and extract the scheme before it can continue, I don't see potential for confusion. Likely, "moz" wouldn't be in the list of supported schemes and the link would simply be dropped.

I think it likely that there will be regexes out there that auto-link it for people.

I sense the dumbest security hole ever...

There is already a working add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/moz-a-protoco... (Firefox only)

I Like the new phonetic spelling. A lot of people weren't voicing the glottal stop the old way.

Could you explain? Is it the mozilla part?

Apparently our friends at Mozcolonslashslasha don't realize how many more important things they could be working on than this.

Of course they do, and that work continued while other people worked on the rebranding. Also, and more importantly, maintaining an up-to-date brand keeps Mozilla relevant and (hopefully) stops them looking like a throwback to a past era (like, say, Yahoo!). Mozilla needs to do many things to remain an important force on the web. Keeping it's brand is one aspect of that work.

They are very aware it seems based on my observations over the last few years and while I don't agree with everything they do I defend their right to spend a tiny fraction of their time on a logo.

- after all it seems logo, ui and pixel polish etc matters a whole lot more to a lot of people than it does to me so it might be well worth updating.

Me? As long as extensions work and they don't copy too much more (bad imo) ideas like hidden menus and hamburger from Chrome and Mac they are still easily my favourite.

Oh, and they have created a new systems programming language that has managed to exite me and a lot of others here on the northeastern side of the Internet.

People keep talking about Mozilla like it's the engineering wing of the EFF, that it's tirelessly working on a mission of Internet freedom, etc.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I see:

(1) a team of developers, incrementally maintaining a codebase that that was donated by a 1990's commercial entity, and

(2) some second-tier marketing types, burning through Google/Yahoo money and padding their resumes with random "me too" projects that don't last very long.

The flagship browser has only had one major re-think since Netscape's demise, and that re-think was, "We should make its UI and dev cycle look like Chrome's". The most significant "new" project dreamed up by the marketing types was a me-too Android alternative, which they then almost immediately canceled.

The only noteworthy and truly innovative things I can think of coming out of Mozilla have been Rust and Persona, and the latter was also quickly canceled (which was a shame since it's the only example I can think of that REALLY fits the mission statement they talk about).

I'm glad that Firefox is out there to prevent a Google monopoly, and I'm glad that Rust has a financial patron since it's a pretty interesting language. But if Mozilla want to be seen as some greater "force for Internet freedom", beyond just maintaining an dated and declining web browser, then a logo change won't be enough. Actually DO some other stuff without canceling it.

Keeping that thingy running all those years and making sure it is still competitive against Chrome (that has 1000 times the resources + free access to put ads for their browser on two of the highest value ad spots that exists) is an engineering masterpiece as well as a marketing masterpiece if you ask me.

Also you write like Firefox extensions haven't been years ahead of competition (proven by the fact that no other browsers have even come close even Mozilla had proven what was possible) and like tabs where commonplace in browsers before Firefox.

Hey, I love Firefox and I'm glad that Mozilla keeps it running. But the parent comment complains that people never talk about anything other than Firefox. Well...

Also, tabs (like most browser UI innovation over the past 15 years) came from Opera.

Mozilla is constantly working for the open web. Not only do they design products, but they invest in work groups and conference for that.

Hell they even produced and gave away the best documentation on the front end currently existing (MDN).

They finance other open sources projects, try to innovate all the time (they fail often, but trying new things always leads to that), pay dev to do so.

The :// thing is cute, but… did Mozilla really need a new logo? Their existing wordmark may not be especially distinctive, but it is familiar. And they have a distinctive symbol, too.

The new logo looks more contemporary. I'm not sure if that's good. Mozilla can be proud of its history, no?

2nd google result for moz://a is that bug report. At least in "my google". ;)

Ironically googling for moz://a from the address bar doesn't work in Firefox Android. It's interpreting it as a protocol and doesn't send it to Google. It displays a blank page.

Moz://a from google returns moz.com as first result. Ironically again, it's a SEO company. Maybe Mozilla needs their services.

Searching "moz://a", neither Google nor DuckDuck shows Mozilla's website on the first page of results... and the SEO company is first in both indeed.

Since Mozilla is a combination of Mosaic + Godzilla, the only good logo for them should have been a dinosaur image laid out in mosaic, that's it. This :// thing is more of a s://y marketing than anything else.

Everything around this redesign is just a clusterfuck: the process, the winner, the hacks introduced to cope with it, the SEO fail, the loss of identity...

Most people don't care.

It shows how emo some of the users are.

just make it do what happen when you type

about:mozilla

in the address bar

btw, about:about will list all of Firefox's internal about: pages.

On some level, this starts to look like a really silly one-up/who-can-violate-the-spirit-of-uris-the-most contest.

So Google got its own TLD just for marketing purposes?

Well, Mozilla got its own scheme for marketing purposes only!

Well, weither you like it or not, it's been such a hot topic we can't deny it's a PR success. Now everybody is talking about mozilla, and sharing this branding and logo.

This is worrying sign when they are trying to change things through branding...

this logo is so tacky

I think the bikeshed should be painted orange!

It is well understood by those of us who are more literate in these things that a bikeshed should have a combination of transparent windshield walls and solid green roof. I therefore propose we tear down the existing, functional, bikeshed as its blue walls (which would not look good in orange) are constructed of a material which is not transparent.

no need to hate on the blue walls. people who park their bikes in bikesheds with walls made of transparent materials shouldn't throw stones.

Well obviously you lack a basic understanding of bikeshed technology. It should be blue!

So once you switch the browser , mozilla website stops working...

Not really. They are talking about a mozilla specific URL handler with a custom (fake) protocol. Something like moz://a would redirect to their motto page, moz://about to their settings or something like that. Switching to chromium and typing mozilla.org would still work.

Just like how chrome://flags/ breaks when you switch away from Chrome. Not very surprising, is it?

Yeah, that will totally solve Mozilla's now so slow fading into irrelevance.

VideoLAN.org website stats tell me that Firefox hits percentage dropped from 26.3% through Jan 2016 to 21.2% through Jan 2017.

Of course this is not a 100% reliable measure, but stats usually don't lie about that.

> Yeah, that will totally solve Mozilla's now so slow fading into irrelevance.

Neither will constant picking on anything they do or don't do.

> VideoLAN.org website stats tell me that Firefox hits percentage dropped from 26.3% through Jan 2016 to 21.2% through Jan 2017.

I guess the reason might just be that the market is moving towards a new equilibrium.

Unless we start making websites and web apps that only work in other browsers then the web is big enough for both Firefox and other inferior browsers ;-)

I'm not picking, I'm just looking at the stats I have. I've actually have it graphed on http://thre.sh/stuff/browsers-stats-videolan.org.png now.

> I'm not picking, I'm just looking at the stats

English isn't my mother tongue so I might have misread. What would you call this, in a toplevel comment about what seems to me to be a well received rebranding:

>> Yeah, that will totally solve Mozilla's now so slow fading into irrelevance.

It's the result of Google throwing their full weight behind Chrome. It's insane not to expect the #1 cash-generating business to take a large bite out of Firefox when they set their mind on creating a browser that ticks all the marks of Mozilla's goals as well: standards-compliant (or setting), fast, secure, open, extensible etc.

And Chrome is now at the absolute core of Google's strategy: they need to make the open web as competitive a platform as possible to stop Facebook's walled garden, or Apple's native platform the future of the web. Because google has no place in those two ecosystems. Thus: Android and Chrome.

Trash-talking Mozilla is only going to make their funding dry up and/or demotivate their employees. But it's in everyone's interest to make sure they thrive. It's only a coincidence that Google and the public's interest are currently aligned. There will come a time in the future where we'll desperately need the competitor that is Firefox. Let's not forget that they were ones lighting a fire under IE from around 2005-2012. Who knows where we'd be without them – .docx instead of .html?

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