Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

sgarrity writes "I've written some recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundation's project and product line. I argue that the Mozilla Project should adopt a simple, strong, consistent visual identity for the Mozilla products including consistent icons across applications that mesh with the host operating system. Read Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0 and let us know what you think."

Comments

What people really want...

[metroid composite]

...is things that block adds and what not. Mozilla has "block immages from this server" which really needs to be advertised more; from stopping adds to blocking out ugly avatars which I'd rather not see on various forums. Wouldn't hurt to advertise a patch that range blocks a few servers like Gator (As I know this can be done, but I'm too lazy to look it up myself).

Though, yes brand name recongition helps with any such advertising, of course.

Re:Mozilla needs it

[hackstraw]

Having it installed as a desktop icon on a Windows default install couldn't hurt either. However, most people don't know that Mozilla is out there, nor do they know that popup/ under/howeverelsetheywanttomakemoneybyannoyingme thingies don't need to exist.

I've been popup free for almost 2 years, I have forgotten about them and when I see someone else use a browser that lets them through, I cringe.

Re:Great Idea... Some Other Suggestions

[Necroman]

X = Tabbed Browsing
X = Popup Blocker
X = Handles CSS properly

Re:Any color but RED

[mrzaph0d]

Coca-cola
Redhat
Target
Lucent Technologies
Pizza Hut
KFC

yeah, no big players there.

Why bother? Because.

[SimplexO]

I'm sure you do realize that mozilla and IE save bookmarks/favorites differently. IE uses individual files for each favorite, where as mozilla uses one file that is basically a webpage itself to hold all of your favorite website needs. There just isn't a practical way for mozilla to use IE's bookmarks if you consider how many profiles mozilla is run on that DON'T have IE.

With that said, you can still find some free wizards to in various places.

If you use the Luna * theme for Mozilla Firebird, run some special customizations with the UI, it'll look EXACTLY like IE (put the location bar in it's own dialog, add a go button, get rid of the search bar, switch the stop and refresh buttons, add the bookmarks and history button, and you've almost got yourself a direct copy (without the sponsored media button and a search button -- but you already have a search bar that you got rid of))

Making toolbars moveable has been slated for AFTER Mozilla Firebird 1.0, so at least you know they are on it. But there are so many programs that don't have moveable toolbars that your argument is invalid anyway.

Regarding making a non-Microsoft Internet Explorer, I think that is a horrible idea. If you can't get used to the Options dialog in Mozilla Firebird, then you don't deserve to be called a teckie. I know some pretty slow people that fell right into that, and away from IE's checkbox heaven.

*Luna does not yet run under MF 0.7. It does run under 0.6, though.

Re:All my favorites are in (dot)mozilla directory

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I'd have thought this would work in Windows too? Firebird user settings are stored in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Phoenix, so isn't that part of the Windows user profile loaded when the user logs in somewhere else?

Aside from that, you can set the location of the bookmarks file by putting this in your user.js file:

// Specify which bookmarks file to use: user_pref("browser.bookmarks.file", "X:\\somewhere\\else\\bookmarks.html");

I think a problem with sharing the "native" IE favourites is, Windows organises its favourites as a bunch of *.url files, which contain not much information. Mozilla favourites are all in a single file and contain info such as the URL of the site-icon. So they don't easily mix.