Mozilla's New Logo Reminds Us that It Is, In Fact, a Web Firm (cnet.com) 185
Mozilla has a new logo. The company has ditched the world "ill" from the name with a colon and two slashes. From a report: Last year, Mozilla, the internet company best known for the Firefox browser, publicly started the rebranding process by opening the door to public feedback. With several options on display, Mozilla asked for comments and input from all who cared to share. As of today, the new logo is official and the simple change is meant as a reminder that Mozilla is more than just a browser.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Seven months since setting out to refresh the Mozilla brand experience, we’ve reached the summit. Thousands of emails, hundreds of meetings, dozens of concepts, and three rounds of research later, we have something to share.
And I thought we had a lot of pointless meetings around here...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I thought it was a Chihuahua with a Taco.
Re: (Score:1)
You can tell how important someone imagines themselves to be by how many pointless meetings they hold.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
That really does explain a lot, huh? Yes, I get it that a logo is important, but damn... "Refresh the Mozilla brand experience"? I don't even know what that means.
Dear Mozilla: Too much navel-gazing, and not enough good software engineering and innovation. No one but you gives a crap about your "brand experience". In case you haven't noticed, you're becoming less relevant every day, and your logo is not the reason why.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Mozilla: Too much navel-gazing, and not enough good software engineering and innovation.
I realized that Mozilla was no longer focused on software when they used donors' money, not to fix bugs and add features, but to sponsor a surfing competition in Hawaii [mozilla.org].
Re: (Score:1)
I don't like this argument as it could just as easily be applied to lots of stuff which has been known to work. "Red Bull has lost their way, they are sponsoring sports competitions for Pete's sake!" "Why is a cancer charity sponsoring a marathon race?"
Brand awareness and image is an important thing. Maybe it "shouldn't" be, but it is.
That being said... I'm having a hard time justifying a surfing trip for Mozilla...
Re: (Score:1)
I'm sorry is there a Red Bull Foundation? Do they take donations?
I donated money to Mozilla to forward their progress not fucking slather their name on banners at a beach bum wank-a-thon
Re: (Score:2)
"Red Bull has lost their way, they are sponsoring sports competitions for Pete's sake!"
That is a bad analogy. Red Bull is a for-profit corporation, and when I give them money it is in exchange for one of their drinks. I have no expectation of anything else.
"Why is a cancer charity sponsoring a marathon race?"
That is a good analogy. If I donated to a cancer charity, with the expectation that my donation was going toward cancer research, and I later found out that they had spent the money sponsoring a marathon, they would never get another dime from me.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a tricky one. You wouldn't have given them money if you didn't know they existed, so they need to engage in at least an element of marketing in some form.
Sponsoring a marathon race is one way they achieve that public awareness. For a cancer charity in the UK (that actually sponsors many many races) it's not (just) a fundraising activity; it's a way for them to engage at risk communities and raise awareness of cancer, how to reduce risk, how to detect it at early stages and how to seek treatment.
This is
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You know "sponsor" just means to buy advertising, right?
Is it your contention that mozilla should not advertise their products?
Or do you disapprove of the placement of the advertising?
Because the surfing demographic are just too old for that new-fangled internet contraption, right?
Re: (Score:2)
You know "sponsor" just means to buy advertising, right?
Is it your contention that mozilla should not advertise their products?
Or do you disapprove of the placement of the advertising?
The advertising is to raise awareness of the product. Shouldn't using resources to make the product great take priority over the marketing of it?
Remember when a good product sold itself from word of mouth, and a company that makes good products builds a reputation from the quality of what they do.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Why would Mozilla what to becomes like many other American corporations -- make shit and use advertising to get people to use it?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The advertising is to raise awareness of the product. Shouldn't using resources to make the product great take priority over the marketing of it?
(1) It is not a binary choice
(2) As a developer and veteran of four startups, I speak from hard life experience when I tell you that without advertising you can have the best fucking product in the world and nobody will give a damn. Marketing is literally more important than product - because a product without users might as well not even exist.
That's a life lesson. Took me 20 years to figure out. Hope I saved you some pain.
Re: (Score:1)
First, lets acknowledge the new location of the goal posts, OK?
Good. Thanks.
Now: An obscure event means it was cheap.
It doesn't matter that surfing has anything to do with the internet.
The demographic is what matters, and surfers use the internet.
Not only do they use the internet, but they are most likely to be mobile-only users because of age and not generally having much money.
So the ads for a mobile OS were on target.
And even if firefox os never went anywhere (which ultimately was the case) they still
Re: (Score:1)
> I realized that Mozilla was no longer focused on software when ...
You are incorrect, sir. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Rust
Maybe it's possible to do both. Because, you know, different budgets are available for different purposes in a large organization. But don't let details like that get in your way as long as it fits your narrative of criticism, I guess.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the current organization even capable of such things?
I ask, because I haven't been impressed with what I've seen so far.
In my opinion, Firefox has gotten progressively worse release after release, sometimes with huge usability blunders. The Australis UI debacle was particularly painful. Then there have been the many smaller, yet unjustifiable, debacles like Hello and Pocket. Meanwhile, Firefox still uses way more memory than Chrome, Opera, Safari or Vivaldi do on my system, while feeling so much slower to me, even without any extensions installed.
I'm not impressed with Servo. It's way, way behind. In my experience it also crashes a lot, totally mis-renders many web pages, and isn't even really usable when just trying it out quickly. And it has been like this for months, if not longer. Each month I try it out, and I don't see any real progress from the month before.
I'm not impressed with Rust. It's an awkward language to use, even when you understand how its borrow checker works. Most of its benefits could already be obtained by using other languages, including C++. And I nearly forgot to mention, its compiler is so frigging slow! I've used C++ a lot, and I know it isn't a fast language to compile, but somehow Rust's compiler makes compiling C++ code seem fast!
I can't think of any other technology that Mozilla has worked on that has gone anywhere. Bugzilla is a relic of the '90s. Thunderbird has stagnated. There was that Firefox OS thing, but I think they canned that project.
It's like Mozilla is just barely hanging on to a single success from long ago (Firefox), while their latest technological developments have been failures, or at best very uninspiring, in my opinion.
I want to believe that good technology can come out of Mozilla, but I keep being proven wrong again and again.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the current organization even capable of such things?
I ask, because I haven't been impressed with what I've seen so far.
In my opinion, Firefox has gotten progressively worse release after release, sometimes with huge usability blunders. The Australis UI debacle was particularly painful. Then there have been the many smaller, yet unjustifiable, debacles like Hello and Pocket. Meanwhile, Firefox still uses way more memory than Chrome, Opera, Safari or Vivaldi do on my system, while feeling so much slower to me, even without any extensions installed.
I feel they went off the rails starting with V4.0. I remember the excitement with the release of V3.0, and the count of Downloads. Starting with V4, they did the "new version every 20 minutes", and changed the UI needlessly without addressing performance issues. It felt less like "us vs. them" in the war on browsers, and more like "ugg, another update, this is as annoying as Abobe Reader / Flash"
FIREFOX WASN'T EVEN THEIR SUCCESS! (Score:1)
Everybody forgets that Firefox (formerly known as Phoenix, until a trademark dispute with Phoenix BIOS...) was actually an independent project by some guy unaffiliated with Mozilla. It was a project to get rid of the bloat and ineptness going on with Mozilla/Netscape Suite in the aftermatch of the 2 year wait between 'open sourcing' their browser, and basically rewriting the whole thing in C++ (which was a terrible idea at the time from a performance perspective, especially with an interpreted all-javascrip
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Refresh the Mozilla brand experience"? I don't even know what that means.
What it means is that you're too smart for an MBA. Don't even bother. Go cure cancer or invent free energy or something instead.
Re: (Score:3)
Users don't care about "brand experience", they care about product experience. Maybe if Mozilla hadn't spent the last 9 years making terrible decisions, poorly allocating resources and prioritizing bugs, distracting themselves with silly crap, useless feature churn, and making their flagship product copy every bad decision Chrome made, more people might still use their products. The path they're on is all but guaranteed to get them into the dustbin of internet relevance.
Re: (Score:2)
Users don't care about "brand experience", they care about product experience.
Apple's marketing team just burst out laughing.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Mozilla: Too much navel-gazing, and not enough good software engineering and innovation. No one but you gives a crap about your "brand experience". In case you haven't noticed, you're becoming less relevant every day, and your logo is not the reason why.
I'd be happy if they just fixed their memory leak(s).
I have 4 browsers open with about 12 tabs running and memory has climbed from ~880 meg to over 1400 meg in just a few hours.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Having done a lot of source comparisons between Firefox and PaleMoon (and especially PaleMoon v26 and v27), it appears that these are not memory leaks, but bad caching policy. Firefox seems to want to cache things indefinitely even if the resources are not needed anymore, but it does not actually "leak" them. I'm still trying to track down how Firefox's automatic management settings work, because this stuff is not controlled with user settings (anything that can be set in user.js).
For a long time I've insisted that if you close all windows and point the last window to about:blank, the browser will still hang on to over a gig of memory. If you do cycle collects and minimize memory usage, the browser still won't release memory. However, if you do a lot of bizarre stuff to flush out the browser history, like open dozens of blank pages and do lots of Backs and Forwards, eventually the browser can be coaxed into clearing caches and you can then cycle collect to get memory usage below 300MB again. The memory does release correctly when it has to. The browser is just designed to use a max, fixed amount of memory, as a percentage of how much RAM you have in your computer. My last tests were with Firefox 47, and on my 16GB Win7 x64 system, that fixed amount appears to be exactly 1.6GB. Firefox 50 uses less memory than 47, but I haven't tested what the max limit is, yet.
The browser is simply trying too hard to be fast by caching the hell out of everything it doesn't need to -- mostly in the Javascript runtime and heap. I have no doubts this can be easily fixed by tweaking some settings, and not rewriting code. Mozilla just absolutely refuses to do this.
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox seems to want to cache things indefinitely even if the resources are not needed anymore, but it does not actually "leak" them.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. I've tried sooooooo many things over the years to get a handle on the Firefox memory issue, and none of them have paid off.
I've tried disabling/removing plugins and extensions, I've tried tweaking all sorts of memory-related settings, caching, max memory, cache limits, etc etc etc. I've set disk limits, memory limits, page limits, history limits, etc etc etc. I've tried the "opening dozens of blank pages" exercise, I've tried the "back and forward" thing, and nothing, not
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, I've literally been chasing this for years to no avail. If it is just some sort of super-aggressive caching policy, then I'd refer you to the comment by AC below, who hit the nail on the head: "Sufficiently aggressive caching policy is indistinguishable from memory leak."
Well, that depends what tool you use to gauge memory usage. I use both the "about:memory" page and the app working set size in Process Explorer. The two don't often agree with each other. In particular, even though about:memory shows that most memory has been released, the working set still hovers over 1GB. Sometimes you have to sit and wait a while before the memory pooler (or whatever) gives memory back to the OS. However, through various tricks, I can indeed get both to reduce to levels similar to a
Re: (Score:2)
However, through various tricks, I can indeed get both to reduce to levels similar to a clean startup.
I'd be very interested in exactly what steps you take to regain the memory so I could try them here and see what happens.
-
Alas, life with PaleMoon is very frustrating, as there are way too many web pages that refuse to adhere to standards and will not work properly.
That alone would likely prevent me from trying it...I have all the frustration I need at the moment, lol.
-
Apparently, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the only browsers worth supporting these days, and standards-compliance just isn't fashionable anymore.
I really don't like Chrome (the constant phoning home, the recent scare tactic of branding any non-https page as "insecure", etc) and I can't run Edge. I guess I'm destined to run Firefox for the foreseeable future. :(
Re: (Score:2)
I guess everything can qualify as an experience these days.
"Excuse me, but I'm non-binary. Don't refer to me as he, but as they."
Congratulations, you just partook in the identity experience!
No concern about FF's dropping market share?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't anyone at Mozilla concerned about Firefox's ever-dropping market share [caniuse.com]? Doesn't it worry them that Firefox is now only about 5% to 6% of the market, across all versions of FF on all platforms (including mobile)?
Chrome 54 and Chrome 55 each have almost twice the market share that Firefox has in total. Yes, we're talking about single versions of Chrome here.
Firefox is well below Chrome for Android.
iOS Safari and UC Browser for Android are each probably above Firefox.
Even Opera Mini and IE 11 each nearly have more users than Firefox at this point.
Doesn't Mozilla realize that they're nothing without Firefox? They don't have any other widely used projects. The next biggest was perhaps Thunderbird, but they gave up on that a while ago. Firefox for Android has gone nowhere. Firefox OS was a total failure. Bugzilla is ancient. Their other lesser-known projects and services haven't seen much uptake, either. Servo, their next-generation rendering engine, somehow makes Mosaic look like a modern browser. The hype around Rust has pretty much died off.
What is Mozilla going to do a few years from now, when their latest search deal with Yahoo is over? Yahoo's situation isn't promising now, and it could be worse in a few years. Maybe they won't be willing to throw money at Mozilla any longer, especially if Firefox has pretty much no users at that point.
An incomprehensible logo doesn't help with any of this. In fact, it's perhaps the most useless thing they could waste resources on. It doesn't help make Firefox a browser that people want to use. It doesn't help their other projects get traction. In fact, they chose a logo that will likely just confuse most people into thinking the organization's name is "Moza".
All of this is unbelievable, yet at the same time it shouldn't be surprising given that we're talking about Mozilla here.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone remember Apple ][ and Apple /// ? (Score:2)
Not the first use of such brand names.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And yet Firefox's market share has actually gone up for the past few releases, so...
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
In their defence, I suspect they had to test the hell out of it to make sure a wide variety of applications, browsers, message clients, wikis, etc wouldn't shit the bed when they tried to parse a URI like moz://a in a chunk of text.
At least, I hope they tested the hell out of it.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
In their defence, I suspect they had to test the hell out of it
Testing is not done at meetings.
Re: (Score:2)
Emergency meeting to discuss that someone should register the "moz" URI scheme with IANA immediately!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
wouldn't shit the bed when they tried to parse a URI like moz://a in a chunk of text.
If an application blows up when it encounters :// in free-form text, I have no sympathy and neither should Mozilla. Too many things try to be cute with minimal and poorly-defined markup these days and any pushback is welcome.
Re: (Score:2)
If an application blows up when it encounters :// in free-form text, ...
Wouldn't be the first time: Skype [slashdot.org], Chrome [slashdot.org]... (although at least Chrome only crashed if it saw that in a url context)
Even Hacker News is tearing it apart. (Score:1)
The new logo and branding is being discussed at Hacker News [ycombinator.com]. Even there, where it is rife with Mozilla fanatics and contributors, the sentiment is very negative. Many people dislike it, some are disappointed, and some even hate it outright.
Keep in mind that Hacker News is a discussion forum where you will almost surely be downvoted and attacked if you don't show extreme devotion to Firefox and Mozilla. The people there will find some way to support pretty much each and every Mozilla initiative, no matter ho
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I've had whole series of meetings involving several very senior overpaid staff that ended up with the conclusion we don't need to do actually do anything and don't need any more meetings when that was obvious to anyone with half a brain before the first meeting. And the management then effectively promoted the organiser of those meetings based on the do nothing outcome of organising unneeded meetings not costing us anything to implement...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this is a Dilbert strip.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you miss the meeting where they tried to yet again inform you that it is inappropriate to get on a videoconference in your underwear?
Re: (Score:1)
I almost exclusively use SeaMonkey as my desktop browser.
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Not bad, IMHO. Better than some of the ideas they had a short time ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I miss Mozilla the lizard [wikipedia.org].
With so much focus on irrelevant rubbish, I'm surprised they haven't removed about:mozilla [about].
rofl (Score:1)
fuck cnet and its autoplay videos!!!1
"moz a" (Score:1)
This is the kind of shit you do when you're going into a death spiral.
RIP Mozilla 1998 - 2017
Re: (Score:1)
Mozilla has been dead for years. They killed themselves the same way nutscrape did, their corpse is simply on life support.
Re: (Score:2)
Colon slash slash something something (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of this other web company, except they had three slashes, two dots, and an org. I don't remember what happened to them.
Re: (Score:1)
Reminds me of Sun's slogan "We are the dot in .com"
(To which an SGI engineer replied "We are the colon in http:/// [http]")
Anyhow, it's time to write an RFC, and claim the moz protocol and URI locator, so they can't sue people for using moz://
Re: (Score:2)
Reminds me of Sun's slogan "We are the dot in .com"
(To which an SGI engineer replied "We are the colon in http:/// [http]")
I can beat that:
"I am the null in /dev/null!"
It's just plain amazing what my employer dumps into me . . .
What are those characters? (Score:5, Funny)
Funny that their logo includes "://" when Firefox itself hides those characters by default on non-https sites.
Re:What are those characters? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's in my list of things I do immediately after installing Firefox to make it usable:
1. restore title bar and menu bar
2. do not close window when closing last tab
3. do not hide http url prefix
Mozilla is more than a browser (Score:2)
What's with the trump hand signs? (Score:1)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ [mozilla.org]
vs
https://www.google.ca/search?t... [google.ca]
It's pretty much his favorite one.
Oh come on, someone had to make this about Trump :p
What ever you do... (Score:1)
...don't enter moz://a into your address bar. Unless you want to see 2 Cowboy Neals and 1 cup.
wew (Score:1)
I like the late-90s PBS ZOOM typography :^)
logo translation; (Score:2)
When that logo garbage is just right [kym-cdn.com]...
Gibberish (Score:5, Interesting)
My brain parses "://" as gibberish and reads that logo as "moz a".
Re: (Score:2)
There's no logo per se (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A huge percentage of "logos" are just names written in some fancy font.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
True, but at least they stylize certain letters unlike Mozilla which hasn't done even that.
No... that's EXACTLY what they've done.
Ditched the world (Score:1)
I'm concerned about the literacy of the Slashdot editors. The summary contains the following phrase:
First, "ditched" is being used as a synonym for "switched". The verb "ditch" is a slang term that probably doesn't belong in a Slashdot summary. Moreover, the slang is being used incorrectly. "Ditch" is not a synonym for "switch". See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ditch [urbandictionary.com].
Second, the editor apparently intended to write "wo
MOZ colon slash slash AH (Score:2)
MOZ colon slash slash AH
Let's me fix the headline a bit... (Score:5, Funny)
Mozilla's New Logo Reminds Us that It Is, In Fact, a Web Firm
...and not a design firm.
clearly infringing on slashdot (Score:2)
The new Mozilla logon fooled me at first. I saw those dots and slashes and began clicking, expecting to land on my favorite web page, Slashdot.org.
But Nooooooo.
Their use of slashes and dots is clearly intended to confuse the average user into thinking they would soon be happily gorging on news for nerds, but it is a trick. Someone should sue them.
Such innovate, much wow (Score:2)
Conservative choice (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They should have just called it (Score:2)
The Internet, few years own the road people would just click on The Internet icon just like in the late 90's when 1/2 of the world though the IE icon was the internet.
Be careful when changing Logos too much. (Score:3)
It does happen, however it is usually gradual over time.
Like the Windows logo where it went to a highly stylized 3d Graphic then it removed the broken pixels, then it moved to the 4 boxes. So we realize the elements in the logo belong to the same group. Mozilla changing to Moz://a from their dragon icon, Is actually a big move. While it is a move from something fun to mr. business. It could had used the dragon icon and simplified it down further to get the point across without tossing out a known brand. When they switch logos too much. People who are not in the know may think they are using a cheap ripoff.
too bad firefox is bloatware (Score:2)
False Dichotomy (Score:2)
takes deep breath... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good logo.
Total MBA wankfest... (Score:1)
how://conceived (Score:3)
Mozilla's new logo reminds us (Score:2)
that it has, in fact, totally lost the plot and has no clue about what's important for its continued survival.
Thank Goodness! (Score:1)
This came way back when Mozilla was planning to change logo... You won't believe what other logos were in the selection at the time.
Mozilla logos selection [netdna-ssl.com]
The internet voted. For once, we picked the best one.
Forget that (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, right. If you want to show that you're a web firm moving the Internet forward and not just a SJW echo chamber that takes millions in search engines' ad revenue and turns it into mindless groupthink "brand experience" marketing baloney, try the following two steps as a start:
I'm glad Mozilla is employing Xiph people for next-gen codec work. I struggle to think of any other way any of what they've done in the last four years has really benefited anyone.
I started using Mozilla as my main browser way back with M7 in 1999. I tried to spread the good word during the dark days of IE6 complete dominance. I trusted the organization. That trust has been destroyed.
Re: (Score:2)
Logo renewal sucks (Score:2)
I have the feeling that any logo renewal leads to terrible result. Perhaps this is because there is never a good reason for changing a logo?
Ah... (Score:2)
Nothing like a logo refresh to solve all of the problems that a company has. /s
"moz://a"? (Score:2)
Is it 1 April already?
Something in the water (Score:1)
https://www.speakdotdot.com/ [speakdotdot.com]
"Mozilla is more than just a browser" (Score:3)
Yeah. It's a shitty "brand design" company now with a legacy browser they're hell-bent on turning into Chrome with a slightly different face.
They've become a company almost totally devoid of technical excellence and mutated into some hippie-activist commune that takes almost a year just to come up with an emoticon-ized version of their logo.
A complete waste of a company...
If I were in charge (Score:2)
I'd also fire everyone in marketing. You gain market share by making a great browser and pleasing users, not by wasting money on this crap.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
be fair... today firefox is the browser that uses less ram and chrome the one that uses more...
they have put lot of work to improve that. If you still have memory leaks, check the about:memory and check what is using it... most of the times is broken add-on, broken javascripts and (still a problem in firefox) animated gifs
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The new logo is kind of limiting. basically saying they only do "web". Which is appropriate, since all other protocols are now wrapped up in the web. Everything is becoming "Cloudified" (ported to the "web"). The web is the new OS.
Re: (Score:2)
And how exactly does "://" signify that Mozilla is about more than the browser, when most people only see "://" in web addresses?
In firefox you don't even see it in the address bar unless you're at an https site
Re: (Score:2)
The // signifies an authority or hostname. URIs that don't refer to a server shouldn't use it.
Which introduces the question, so just who is "a" anyways?