Hacker News Reader

Comment by stu2b50 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a little unintuitive for no other reason than, to be honest, there aren't that many "Firefox" products beyond the browser now that send among others have been axed.

Additionally, I feel like it would make more sense for the overarching brand to be... Mozilla? It's Mozilla Firefox, right? And there use to be Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.

I guess Mozilla is too unattractive a brand to be the parent brand or something?

In the end I have no objection or attraction to the rebranding but I do find it somewhat weird in execution.

View on HN

As someone who used to work at Mozilla, I think the move to an overarching Firefox brand makes a ton of sense. I’ve had this conversation a number of times, all around the world:

me: “oh, I work at Mozilla”

them: “who? Should I know who that is?”

me: “you know, the Firefox people”

them: “oh my gosh, I love Firefox! I use it every day.”

People outside of tech know Firefox, not Mozilla.

As someone who didn't used to work at Mozilla but does work with a lot of elderly people (both personally and on various occasions professionally) who use Firefox, they usually do call it Mozilla and scratch their heads when I call it Firefox (until it clicks for them and they realize "oh, you must mean my Mozilla!". This is in spite of it even being labelled "Firefox" on their desktops; they just see the orange and blue and think "well there's my Mozilla!".

I sometimes wonder if it's because they were Netscape users back in the day and got confused about the transition.

That's my experience too. I think it is because for long time desktop icon was labeled "Mozilla Firefox", so they remembered first part of the name and still call it Mozilla.

So the solution to that problem is to dilute the brand that resonates with people, by using it for only tangentally related products, like email relays and vpns and what not?

That way, in a couple years you say you know, the Firefox peole and they say "who?"

You see that with Google and Alphabet. “Alphabet who?” “the google people”.

It’s Google Maps, not Alphabet Maps. Isn’t that a similar situation?

And it doesn’t dilute the Google brand, if anything I’d argue it strengthens it and makes it even more well known.

Google was born Google and created Alphabet as a holding entity for subsequent acquisitions.

Mozilla created Firefox.

It’s like if Google decided to rebrand Google Maps to Chrome Maps if Chrome ended up having better brand recognition.

That has happened to some extent; there are a number of products named after Chrome. Chromecast has nothing to do with a web browser (or even Chrome OS, another Chrome-branded product).

It definitely hasn’t gotten to a point where we’re getting Chrome Maps, but the proliferation of Chrome-branded devices does indicate that Mozilla focusing more on Firefox the brand is a reasonable decision.

> Chromecast has nothing to do with a web browser

At one point it basically did, since Chrome was (IIRC) the first thing to support casting to Chromecasts.

I'd argue that chrome OS sounds a lot like it's an OS built around the browser and Web apps.

At least they didn't tell you they have Mozilla and Adobe installed. I sometimes hear those from non-technical folks too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com