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Firefox: The Evolution of a Brand
- Touche 7y agoAnyone else getting "Connection is not secure" warning for this site, in Firefox? Hopefully they'll at least appreciate the irony in a blog post positioning themselves as being about privacy.
- sciurus 7y agoNo, I don't get any errors. Are you using any proxies, antivirus, etc that might interfere with your web traffic? https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls
- Touche 7y agoIt's now showing as secure in Firefox for me, but still insecure in Chrome. I wonder if something is going on with the certificate...
- floatingatoll 7y agoIf you inspect the insecure warning, is it a certificate issue or an in-page resources issue?
- rnotaro 7y agoIt's a Let's Encrypt Authority X3 certificate for blog.mozilla.org. 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.
- neogodless 7y agoFor anyone that's confused like me, Period of Validity Begins On June 2, 2019 Ends on August 31, 2019
- rnotaro 7y agoYou're right and it's too late to edit it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zhte415 7y agoI'm not. Using Firefox on Android. The website is https signed via Let's Encrypt.
- LinuxBender 7y agoDo you get the same fingerprint? 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 Oh, here's the problem [1] scroll down a bit [1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.mozilla.org https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.mozilla....
- timdiggerm 7y agoThis is probably a good move, as "Firefox" has much better name recognition than "Mozilla"
- hackinthebochs 7y agoDoes it? I've had more than one non-techy friend refer to firefox as "Mozilla".
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoIt's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon. 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.
- stcredzero 7y agoIt's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon. 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.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoI'd be happy if they went back to something better resembling their 2000s logo (finer details, more 3D): https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932005 https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932...
- asark 7y agoOh wow, '05-'09's the clear peak, seeing them all near one another like that. Every other one is worse.
- pookieinc 7y agoThis may be off topic, but does anyone know where I can find more of these evolutionary branding changes? I’d love to read more and have tried to google, but wasn’t able to find a good list, thanks in advance!
- plibither8 7y agoBrand New is a good resource: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
- lol768 7y agoNot personally a fan of the way they're (ab)using the browser brand for unrelated products, but it might help with recognition from your average person who doesn't know what Mozilla is.
- e1ven 7y agoPersonally, I think this is very silly. 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.
- slim 7y agoit's confusing only for us. for most people the browser is transparent. they say things like "should I click on google?" meaning the google chrome Icon. generally they will name the browser after whatever service is on the home page. that's the insight they are building upon
- garaetjjte 7y agoFor non-tech people I'm not really sure that Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla. "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)
- cpeterso 7y agoFirefox's current Windows Start Menu and macOS shortcuts are just "Firefox" these days.
- zapzupnz 7y agoYour name looks Dutch or maybe Afrikaans. I could imagine that in some places, the 'Mozilla' brand takes precedent for one reason or another. In the majority of the world, it's very clearly Firefox — when people install it, they search for Firefox. Mozilla as the main brand is a relic of the late 90s/early 00s.
- Vinnl 7y ago
- eps 7y ago> Tell us. We can take it. 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.
- jchw 7y ago>forcibly cute The repulsion to anything “cute” is always perplexing to me. It comes up quite frequently when discussing branding and design.
- huhtenberg 7y agoCuteness has its place in branding and it can be used very effectively, but it's not a particularly good fit for software products.
- modernerd 7y agoDo you think “technically excellent and precise software” is the core message they want to send? 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.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoI really preferred the browser logo looking like an actual fox and not just a fox tail... oh well. 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.
- couchand 7y agoTo clarify my understanding from the article: the browser logo continues to be the full fox, but the wider brand logo is the thing that looks like a headless tail.
- tyingq 7y agoScroll down the page a bit.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoMy mistake, the blog said the browser logo would be changed so i assumed it was to this.
- Vinnl 7y agoThe browser logo still clearly has at least a fox snout - it's the Firefox product family logo that's just the tail.
- Causality1 7y agoIs anyone else slightly bothered by the fact the browser logo is now "Fox wrapped around generic purple circle" instead of "Fox wrapped around earth"?
- Qwertystop 7y agoIt's been a generic blue circle for a while.
- aibara 7y agoAnd even before that there were just random land masses on the blue ball, clearly not earth.
- nocman 7y agoThat's just until a new logo comes out, like when they go truly minimalistic, something like ... https://pasteboard.co/IiXKmDT.png https://pasteboard.co/IiXKmDT.png
- ljm 7y agoTake a cue from the games industry and just switch to ‘FIREFOX’ written in Impact, with some dirty effect on top to make it look weathered. https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/modern-game-logos-are-rubbish https://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/modern-game-logos-ar...
- Haga 7y agoYes, first you pretend to be a buisness, then you are a business, then you sell out. The dark side of the force knows many secrets, for example reviving past successes by selling your soul. Let the longing flow through you..
- censorByDefault 7y agoI don't give a shit about browser brands because it's sort of a joke by now. 20 years in, and nothing changes. So Firefox is obviously a follower, not a leader. Firefox has made a lot of meaningless choices, and more than a handful of choices I strongly disagreed with. Each and every time, you can read the tells of those choices, and quickly understand where Firefox is situated in terms of autonomy and authority. None and none on both. This is pretty much the new Yahoo! logo all over again. Who cares? How hard is it to support RSS? Why is about:config the only place where meaningful toggles like JavaScript:enabled live? Cookies and tracking protection is a total shit show of user interface confusion. Fuck Pocket. And no, I don't want any shit on my new tab page. I understand that Netscape was the browser that tried to do too much. Firefox is approaching similar territory. The browser only needs to do a few things. Some of them are actually quite difficult, such as video and graphics. The JavaScript interpretter is nothing to sniff at. Encryption and security is especially tough. But at the core, broker HTTP requests and put powerful settings within easy reach, and don't show me fluff or preach to me. Chrome fails at this. Microsoft fails at this. Apple fails at this. Firefox only succeeded a long time ago, when things were simpler. Since then, interlopers have introduced terrible ideas and needless destruction.
- akersten 7y agoI love the Firefox icon, and thought it was the new icon for the browser. But then realized they have a separate "Firefox browser" icon instead - and I'm also not really seeing the connection between the four icons they're showing, other than a roughly similar color palette. 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.
- adrusi 7y agoI like both the Firefox and Firefox Browser icons. For myself, I'd be OK with the abstract Firefox icon becoming the browser's icon, but I worry that it wouldn't be as recognizable to someone scrolling through the app store. And I want other people to use Firefox, so that Mozilla has more resources for all their ventures. I thought I didn't like the other icons, but they look nice in context. See: https://i.imgur.com/Z4laxJy.png 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.
- newscracker 7y agoSo the browser icon still has the Fox! I’m relieved and happy. 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.
- coldtea 7y agoEverytime I see Mozilla's efforts at branding I sigh...
- basic6 7y agoAll they do is rebrand, I don't think any programmers work at Mozilla anymore.
- unethical_ban 7y agohttps://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/67.0/releasenotes/
- MikusR 7y agoYes they also have some writers.
- mncolinlee 7y agoA total rewrite of Firefox for Android with the new GeckoView engine is going live soon. We have close to 1,000 engineers doing impactful work on things like engine development, Rust, WebAssembly, AV1, etc. Our designers are busy because design really matters to getting product into hands!
- nercht12 7y agoExcept creating a fast browser that obeys web standards. I switched to an old fork of Firefox that's fast and now in maintenance mode. Works fantastic.
- mncolinlee 7y agoGeckoView is substantially faster than the old Gecko mobile engine, just like Quantum/Servo did for desktop. I don't know what web standards you think are missing.
- jdofaz 7y agoI still miss the Mozilla splash screen http://books.mozdev.org/html/figs/moz_0607.png http://books.mozdev.org/html/figs/moz_0607.png
- T-hawk 7y agoI love that that's still an 8-bit palette-based image. And that that's immediately recognizable by noticing the banding and dithering in the colors.
- huhtenberg 7y agoIt is actually a 7-bit palette! There are exactly 128 unique colors in the image.
- Hamuko 7y agoHow many branding exercises does Mozilla do? Because I swear I keep seeing it an awful a lot.
- kabwj 7y agoGotta burn the money from donations somehow.
- jmichaelhudson 7y agoThere is an inverse relationship between quality of product and amount of advertising required, and this law is universal. I, too, would be frantically rebranding and flooding the internet with positive messaging after I was so incompetent I broke the entire world's privacy addons and pretended it didn't happen. To think they are using actual money from donations from people who want a private browser to stab all those people in the back with a cloud browser, yeah, people born yesterday, meet a fictitious legal entity run by a secret council of oligarchs. They start so helpful, they end so monstrous.
- Jaepa 7y agoFirefox is trying to to start offering paid services to diversify away from search. I'd guessing they're trying to unify there design iconography style for that.
- dlandis 7y agoI tend to not like it when companies transform the meaning of a popular brand into a more general, "parent" brand. Why would you intentionally make the meaning of a well-understood brand ambiguous? In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/ https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
- wvenable 7y agoThe only successful example I can think of was RIM rebranding itself as Blackberry. There are probably a few others. Although they're likely all narrowing examples (company changes name to focus on single product) rather than widening ones like this.
- mjw1007 7y agoI think likewise. Even if they're willing to go to the huge effort to go through all their own documentation to make it tell the truth given the new definition of Firefox, third parties aren't going to. I don't think it went well for Apache.
- Macha 7y agoSpring for a while was the worst of this. You look for spring. Then docs. Then guides. Now which of these guides describes the DI framework: https://spring.io/guides https://spring.io/guides At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays: https://spring.io/projects https://spring.io/projects
- Vinnl 7y agoI generally agree that that's a risk, but not a certainty. For example, I don't think many people have problems discerning Google Docs from Google Search - or at least, not many more than were it still called Writely.
- bgribble 7y agoIt has always annoyed me that they call the product "Firefox" but the animal in the branding is a red fox and not a firefox. The firefox (aka red panda) is a totally different animal more closely related to a raccoon than to a fox. They look enough alike that it could easily have been an actual firefox in the logo but they go out of their way to give cues that it's a red fox. shrug
- bad_good_guy 7y agoI think you are too literal. Its a fox made of fire, not just a red fox.
- Diti 7y agoI wish Mozilla embraced the red panda instead of the fox.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI didn't even realize that a firefox was a real species.
- bad_good_guy 7y agoNothing puts me off adopting Firefox as a main browser more than Mozilla and their constant poor decisions.
- novok 7y agoYet another geometric sans flat art style sf echo chamber rebrand. 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?
- asark 7y agoI do think there's less risk in doing what everyone else is. It's like the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" of the design world. You don't have to be as good to get positive feedback on your design, too, because trend-following invites less scrutiny (not commenting on this log in particular, just general laziness/poor-talent that trend following fosters). You do something original, it better be good or you'll get crucified. Yet Another Flat Logo? Yeah, looks great, ship it.
- 3bodyProblem 7y agoMan, the comments here are vicious. I like it, the fox tail is pretty recognizable. And the firefox logo looks likes it's protecting the purple core, it's a bit softer. Can't say they made some stupid decisions regarding pocket last few years, but with design system it feels more like they are competing with the likes of google and facebook then just being the l33th4xor browser that is used by someone starting sentences with "Actually, ". Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.
- nocman 7y agoI don't find them to be vicious -- just honest.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boringuser1 7y agoHow about just make a good browser and stop forcing us to use Chromium because FF runs like trash?
- musicale 7y agoFirefox: the ongoing compromise and crapification of what started as a a very sensible and obvious idea - make a web browser that serves users rather than corporations and advertisers!
- jasonhansel 7y agoI honestly think there's a case for renaming Mozilla (the company) to Firefox (which is, I think, far better known). This has happened before to other companies (e.g. RIM and Panasonic come to mind) when the product name becomes better known than the manufacturer.
- craigsmansion 7y ago"It’s a radical act to be optimistic about the future of the internet." 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.
- user17843 7y agoUnfortunately the mozilla website is run by Marketing people nowadays. There are many competent engineers at mozilla who probably don't believe in this nonsense marketing mumbling, but they no longer have a word to say about how the product is communicated. 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.
- salutonmundo 7y agoHearing a free software project talk about "branding" and "a range of products and services" makes my eye twitch.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoFree is not the same as non-profit. If Mozilla didn't work on branding, it'd already be at 0% use.
- mikl 7y agoBranding is not the problem. The reason they lost most of their market share to Chrome was that they fell behind on technology. For years, Firefox was much slower than Chrome and that kind of complacency is remembered by consumers.
- Kaiyou 7y agoThe reason their market share fell is because they made Firefox worse with each release since 2011. If they hadn't spend so much effort in worsening Firefox, they wouldn't be where they are now.
- TheRealPomax 7y agoWhat a bizarre thing to say? The reason their market _share_ went down is because Google owns Chrome and Android, and incredibly successfully marketed (and still markets) those where it has to, and simply gets free users hand over fist where it doesn't. 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.
- Spivak 7y agoThe Firefox browser logo looks very good. My only complaint is that the logos for the other services look so different that in isolation I wouldn't really know that they're part of the same brand. The new shapes are cool but they don't look like they're part of the same design. Like the designers had ideas in-mind for the other services and then had to work the original logo in. I mean Mozilla is a dinosaur and Firefox is a fox -- the rest of the logos seem too literal. They're instantly forgettable because they just relate to their function. 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.
- jccalhoun 7y agoFirefox articles always bring out such mean and bitter comments. I guess anger is better than apathy but the comments about Firefox and Mozilla seem especially pretty
- mikl 7y agoMaybe that's because Mozilla is such a poorly run company. They let themselves be overtaken by Chrome because they were busy will all sorts of stupid side projects instead of concentrating on making a good browser. 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.
- Kaiyou 7y agoIt's because Firefox finds creative ways to get worse with every update without fail since 2011.
- steve_taylor 7y agoEveryone needs a job, I suppose.
- tuscen 7y agoClosing YouTube comments section and openly mocking criticism using "celebrities read mean tweets" style is a dick move considering that they praise openness and kindness. 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.
- undoware 7y agoI'm an engineer who used to work in comms (yes, the reverse path can occur). 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.
- mikl 7y agoToday in stupid, pointless redesigns: Mozilla destroys one of the best icons out there, replaces the Firefox logo with a generic swirly likeness of it. 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.
- asark 7y agoThe trouble is just doing that—yes, even in this modern world of wildly complicated and huge Web standards—wouldn't require anything like the staff and funding they have now. That'd come with a large-double-digits-percentage layoff of staff. Won't happen. Probably they'd have trouble winding back down to just making a good browser now even if their funding dropped to a point that it couldn't sustain their current, expensive, useless fucking about, due to all the organizational death-throes that'd happen. 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.
- mikl 7y agoAssuming you're correct, there's plenty of useful stuff they could do with the extra money. Further development of Rust, revive Thunderbird, support web tech, come up with something that makes Google's AMP irrelevant. And of course, put some money in the bank for leaner times.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- RenRav 7y agoI really dislike the quantum color palette, everything looks like a glow-in-the-dark poster.
- adultSwim 7y agoDisappointing seeing marketing language and thinking. Firefox is good because Mozilla is better than a company.