Firefox: The Evolution of a Brand
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla, so they're calling these all "Firefox XX"..
But Firefox doesn't have a brand as a generic set of utilities, it has a brand as a web browser, and this weakens that.
It reminds me of the articles about "Charging for Firefox" that were released earlier this week. If instead they had said "Mozilla is planning to offer a co-branded Mozilla VPN", it would have been clearer, and fewer people would have been confused about if the browser cost money.
Putting everything under the Firefox brand dilutes it to meaninglessness.
(The specific issue with the "Charging for Firefox" articles, was, I think, that the root source of that was an interview with a German website, causing details to be lost in translation.)
And that also explains the move. If they had a great second product, it would stand for itself, no matter the name.
This move is a desperate attempt of saving a product that is becoming increasingly meaningless (the browser).
- Firefox Monitor is simply a copy of HIBP, so no innovation here. It's a nice-to-have, and maybe would have it's use case if it was directly implemented inside the browser.
- Firefox Lockwise doesn't have many use cases, and apparently also not many users. It is hard to know what kind of product it wants to be, or what kind of problem it wants to solve, as it is no competition for the more well known password management tools.
- Firefox Send offers a quick way to send some files. Not bad, but already offered by countless competitors.
So basically all three products are simply nice-to-have gimmicks, they are no stand-alone products and they certainly don't need a branding.
They all have in common that in the current state you can't make any money with them, and Mozilla doesn't monetize them.
What they do instead, is use each of the above services to get people to register for a Firefox Account, in an attempt to bring people into the "Firefox ecosystem".
And this brings us to the problem with Mozilla. They want to be part of the big players, but they are just a 1000 employee company.
They will never establish an ecosystem.
They will never profit off the email addresses they collect with Send, Lockwise, and Monitor.
They will not be profitable with Pocket.
Everything they do to save their brand from going under is, at the moment, a money-losing business.
Ironically the only product that is indeed at least a stand-alone product, namely Pocket, is not included in the re-branding.
- Firefox Monitor reaches more people to minimise the adverse effects of data leaks, and helps internet users to prevent them in the future. Potential further integration with Firefox will help make this usable by more people.
- Firefox Lockwise likewise can help getting the benefits of password managers to more people.
- Firefox Send offers a quick and private way to send some files.
They all also get people into the "Firefox ecosystem", reinforcing each other and giving Mozilla more leverage to help people be part of an open and accessible internet.
In the end, all they need to do is remain solvent while doing so - not make money. So far, their search engine deal is sufficient for that. Hopefully they'll find more ways to diversify their income streams, but that should never be the the sole criterium of whether or not to run a service or produce a product.
It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk for political moves of "keeping users safe", which I don't really know what it means, but the image that comes to mind is that of pre-school children being protected by overly protective helicopter parents.
I have long thought that Mozilla should essentially dissolve the Foundation, as the Foundation under Baker is abusing the work of the corporation. Unfortunately the Foundation holds all the power, which explains why Mozilla is behaving so erratically.
The CEO is basically reporting to the Foundation, so the people who work for the corporation have a boss that is not acting independent, but in the interests of a shadowy group of people who don't even interact with the employees. Most of the people managing the Foundation get enourmous salaries, while some of them only appear on site a couple of times a year when it comes to voting.
It does; it's the sole owner.
> It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk
While I agree there might be a risk of diluting the brand, I wouldn't describe that as anything near "suicidal". In any case, the business exists to support the foundation, not the other way around. Mozilla shouldn't put its mission at risk for business moves of "making lots of money".
> which I don't really know what it means
In the case of Monitor and Lockwise: that their passwords do not get stolen or abused. In the case of Send: that their files are not stolen.
"do you use google or mozilla?" (and it is not very surprising, desktop shortcuts are labeled 'Google Chrome', 'Mozilla Firefox' and they are just looking at first part)
Mozilla as the main brand is a relic of the late 90s/early 00s.
My suggestion: make the proposed "Firefox" brand icon the actual browser icon (because it's much, much better), and unify the rest of Mozilla development under a Mozilla brand instead of pushing Firefox up the chain to turn it into a brand.
I thought I didn't like the other icons, but they look nice in context. See: https://i.imgur.com/Z4laxJy.png
The unified colorscheme of the logos does make it quite clear that the Firefox XYZ products fall under the Firefox umbrella. I thought that the inconsistency in shape looked off on the branding overview page, but what that page doesn't show is that these icons aren't going to appear next to one another all at the same size. And that makes the difference.
I'm just waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way when elaborate neo-rococo design lovingly handcrafted by neural networks and displayed in retina HDR will come into vogue. The world needs more birds and gold leaf.
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932...
It's kind of striking how bland the other icons are. I just did this exercise. I rapidly scrolled the article, and I can't tell what those other icons represent.
Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.
In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
Now which of these guides describes the DI framework:
At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays: https://spring.io/projects
I don't think it went well for Apache.
There are exactly 128 unique colors in the image.
Personally I find this redesign unnecessary. The current Firefox logo is beautiful and very recognizable. And the new logos of other sub brands look like unrecognizable rainbow coloured spaghetti. I hardly can distinguish them from each other.
They all look so identical you would think its from one company and maybe even art director sketching all of these out.
What is happening in design departments? Do people ostracize you if try something different?
With half a billion dollar in revenue your radical act amounts to "be optimistic about the future of the Internet" and share that now through a branding exercise? No actual radical acts that would actually improve the future of the Internet?
"We disrupt the status quo because it’s the right thing to do."
Unless the status quo is advertising, or microsoft, or google, or drm in the w3c.
"Build better products."
Maybe start with "product", singular. Also maybe stop talking about your browser as a "product" that needs to be peddled.
"Open. Open-minded. Open-hearted. Open source. An open book."
Not open-web though, only fuzzy and easy feel-good "open" stuff.
"The brand system is built on four pillars [..] We make transparency and a global perspective integral to our brand [..] The Firefox brand exploration began [..] working on the Mozilla brand identity."
What do these things even mean? Remember when driven users took out a 2-page advertisement in a well-known newspaper to spread the word? Because you made an awesome browser? A browser that put its users and the open web first?
"branding without walls"
Unless you were Debian, or some other distro that needed to patch your stuff because market share is more important than getting a good browser into the hands of as many users as possible.
Guess this kind of cognitive dissonance happens when a company rises from $160 to $560 million in yearly revenue within 5 years, without having to report to anyone outside the company.
Now that the writing is on the wall for ad-tech revenue they aggressively try to shift the narrative about themselves, because the last thing they want is to be associated with the "evil google". Unfortunately, as long as they take more than a million dollars every day from them, these things are just lip service with not value.
I miss the old mozilla because it was such a great grass-roots movement but they should have never accepted the money from google.
Still today, they're burning a huge part of their budget copying services found elsewhere and slapping Firefox branding on it.
And meanwhile, they dumped Thunderbird, a truly beloved open source project.
Mozilla is in a unique position to do some good with all the money they get from Google, but much of the time they squander it, that's why so many are frustrated with them.
When something like Chrome happens (and it happened big, you may remember the global advertisement campaign they ran. How much do you think that cost them?), even if you were to increase your number of daily/weekly/monthly active users, you'd STILL lose market share because Google can literally throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the market and cause your market share to go down simply because they win more new users than you. And there have been a LOT of new users since 2011. It's easy to forget how few people were persistently online back then, and how different sites were. IE9 had just been released. We were still making sites that had to support IE6.
If you don't like what FF has become over the last 8 years, that's fair enough, but calling that the reason why their share is so low is just blatantly ignoring the actual history of the web.
The reason Firefox lost me as a user is because of what I said. It all started to go downhill with Firefox 4.0.
https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/modern-game-logos-ar...
I mean a keyhole for a password manager, a magnifying glass for monitoring, a cloud for send? Not super inspired and feel really generic. How about a nose for Monitor, sniffing out problems, ayy? Maybe a dog pack for Send, those little packs that hang off the sides -- have cute imagery of the fox delivering packages. Communicates right away that it integrates with Firefox too. Would a fox hole at the base of a tree be too much for the PW manager? It's a safe place for sensitive things. Have a little animation of a mama fox protecting it and scaring off predators.
I don't recall what web standards I had in mind at the time I wrote my comment, sorry.
Horrible.
Forcibly cute and overly friendly palette paired with soft and curvy lines is the exact opposite of what one would expect from an entity behind technically excellent pieces of precise software engineering. I usually don't have strong opinions on redesigns (unless something is poorly kerned), but this is completely, way off. Solid Dribbble material though. Peeps there will be ecstatic.
The messages of “friendly” and “cute”/“soft” you derived from the new look are much bigger wins for a brand building their image around friendliness and safety.
But the only reason why Firefox enjoys its moderate surge in popularity right now is its technological excellence, not because it's "friendly".
Besides, there's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to look friendly. It's just they are overdoing it in a way that takes away from their tech cred. And they also chose to do it in a very cliche style. I wasn't kidding about Dribbble. The front page there has been choke-full of similar branding projects for months now. They all look the same.
HN users are not the majority of Firefox's users. We are not the entire target audience.
If you're a power user, you have no opinion on this new set of icons: they're irrelevant, you're never going to see them, or use them.
The repulsion to anything “cute” is always perplexing to me. It comes up quite frequently when discussing branding and design.
While I sympathize with the folks who feel like this dilutes a nearly holy symbol/brand with a bunch of needless cruft, the unreformed, unrepentant marketing devil in me acknowledges that this is a Good Move and I wish I had thought of it.
The rest of the icons look fine to me, though I do agree that using Firefox as the name for every service from Mozilla may dilute its value as well as cause some confusion for people who are vaguely familiar with Firefox the browser.
EDIT: the blog said the browser logo would be changed too, i figured to the same one as the parent logo. I didn't just skip over the article.
shrug
Mozilla should fire their design department and shut down all the stupid side projects. Just make a good browser, that's all we're asking for.
Remember when Mozilla kinda sucked and were famous bumblers, as an organization, but that little Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox team managed to revive it by producing a great browser that soon ate the entire brand, it was so good, and the organization (improbably!) had enough collective sense to foster that rather than kill it? That's probably the best outcome we can still hope for. IDK if they're organizationally capable of letting that happen anymore, or which quarter of the current Mozilla organization such a thing (whatever it might be) would come from.
And of course, put some money in the bank for leaner times.
Hopefully they'll at least appreciate the irony in a blog post positioning themselves as being about privacy.
Are you using any proxies, antivirus, etc that might interfere with your web traffic?
https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls
The Certificate is valid from August 31, 2019 2:31:34 PM to June 2, 2019 2:31:34 PM.
Potential issues with your system:
-- MITM attack?
-- Your antivirus is intercepting your browser traffic but doesn't have a valid certificate?
-- Invalid System time?
You could give us the error message you get instead of a generic comment on HN.
Begins On June 2, 2019
Ends on August 31, 2019
openssl s_client -servername blog.mozilla.org -connect blog.mozilla.org:443 < /dev/null 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -fingerprint -noout -in /dev/stdin | column -t
SHA1 Fingerprint=D5:98:41:7E:DD:1C:10:E9:C5:CA:49:78:A1:C2:8F:C1:39:3F:2F:D5
[1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.mozilla....