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Wow. This really brings back the Blake Ross interview from Founders at Work, where he was talking about how the Mozilla developers and designers just plain did

Wow. This really brings back the Blake Ross interview from Founders at Work, where he was talking about how the Mozilla developers and designers just plain didn't understand Real People. His descriptions of the crazy design ideas those guys were coming up with read like they were critiquing the designs in this article. It's actually spooky. The funny thing is, this was the reason that FireFox forked from Mozilla in the first place, and the reason why it became popular with regular people. Now it's back as the main branch of Mozilla, and it looks like the Crazy Communist Dinosaur team is back at the helm. It's fascinating to watch.

nikblack 18y ago
I remember the same interview. They have also forgotten what made Firefox popular in the first place, it was simple, fast and secure. FF is starting to become bloat again - and it will eventually be eclipsed by the KHTML based browsers like Chrome simply because they will go back to the Mozilla way rather than the Firefox way These re-designs worry me.
c3o 18y ago
I disagree that this is the same thing. At the release of Mozilla 1.0, the website looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org... -- clearly targeted towards developers, with product download links hidden in a nondescript column. I suppose that's what Ross was talking about: The site didn't offer any convincing arguments as to why you'd want to download their browser, and didn't make it easy to do so. Nowadays, the download site has moved to mozilla.com which is very much targeted at "Real People", and .org is about evangelism and developer info, at least the first of which these designs reflect quite well. If they go overboard it's on the marketing speak and boldness, but certainly not on technical details and programmer jargon like the old mozilla.org did. That said, the .com vs .org distinction is probably confusing: They should just move Firefox to firefox.com and drop the Mozilla brand from it altogether.

nikblack 18y ago

I remember the same interview. They have also forgotten what made Firefox popular in the first place, it was simple, fast and secure. FF is starting to become bloat again - and it will eventually be eclipsed by the KHTML based browsers like Chrome simply because they will go back to the Mozilla way rather than the Firefox way These re-designs worry me.

c3o 18y ago

I disagree that this is the same thing. At the release of Mozilla 1.0, the website looked like this: http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020802080030/http://mozilla.org... -- clearly targeted towards developers, with product download links hidden in a nondescript column. I suppose that's what Ross was talking about: The site didn't offer any convincing arguments as to why you'd want to download their browser, and didn't make it easy to do so. Nowadays, the download site has moved to mozilla.com which is very much targeted at "Real People", and .org is about evangelism and developer info, at least the first of which these designs reflect quite well. If they go overboard it's on the marketing speak and boldness, but certainly not on technical details and programmer jargon like the old mozilla.org did. That said, the .com vs .org distinction is probably confusing: They should just move Firefox to firefox.com and drop the Mozilla brand from it altogether.