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Mozilla Is Changing Its Look -- and Asking the Internet For Feedback (arstechnica.com)
Megan Geuss, writing for ArsTechnica: Mozilla is trying a rebranding. Back in June, the browser developer announced that it would freshen up its logo and enlist the Internet's help in reaching a final decision. The company hired British design company Johnson Banks to come up with seven new "concepts" to illustrate the company's work. The logos rely on vibrant colors, and several of them recall '80s and '90s style. In pure, nearly-unintelligible marketing speak, Mozilla writes that each new design reflects a story about the company. "From paying homage to our paleotechnic origins to rendering us as part of an ever-expanding digital ecosystem, from highlighting our global community ethos to giving us a lift from the quotidian elevator open button, the concepts express ideas about Mozilla in clever and unexpected ways," Mozilla's Creative Director Tim Murray writes in a blog post. Mozilla is soliciting comment and criticism on the seven new designs for the next two weeks, but this is no Boaty McBoatface situation. Mozilla is clear that it's not crowdsourcing a design, asking anyone to work on spec, or holding a vote over which logo the Internet prefers. It's just asking for comments.
Way to hide your brand effectively, Mozilla!
Go with the blue one that actually says "Mozilla" somewhere in a way that most people will be able to recognize.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
They are trying to polish a turd. Logos don't mean anything, this isn't sugar water. They better fix their core.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp...
Incredibly strong urge for Baskin-Robbins right now, am I the only one?
How about you just build a freaking browser?
It takes the style from the window manager, has an address bar and buttons that you deem fit. It is a stupid browers, not a design project where you can compensate you did not go to art school. Big browsing window. Small frame as the window manager offers. Thankyouverymuch.
Who gives a damn what it looks like when it's a buggy memory hog. Changing a logo is just turd-polishing.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You ignored al feedback so far, why ask now, just to ignore us again?
So many other more important things they could be doing with their product. I've been frustrated with Chrome's greed lately and would love an alternative. They have an opportunity, but instead are making logos.
How about "crowdsourcing" a design for the browser? Mozilla's drivers are shroom tripping at the wheel.
is why I read Slashdot.
Next up: Is Beige The Right Paint Color For Walls?
As far as "look", I want to see the non-content part take up less vertical space. It's fine on a 1920X1200 screen, but on smaller screens I have to rock the page up and down to use it effectively. Find a way to offer browser features without taking up space at the top of the frame.
As far as function, I'd like the browser to not consume the entire four cores, please. When I'm doing something else (example, Lightroom) and the response is extremely sluggish, Task Manager will show Firefox consuming most of my memory and nearly pegging all CPUs, reminding me yet again that I forgot to dismiss Firefox before doing, well, pretty much anything else. It's just a browser, for chrissake. Just sitting there it shouldn't take up that much in resources.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
... they want their logo back. Joking aside, if changing to any, the Moz://a looks the best to me; however, I do not think that rebranding will solve any particular problem. On the other hand, I might be convinced to stick around with their brand a bit longer if they stop removing features I use and stop adding bloat that I do not need. It *is* difficult, I realize, to make a "one size fit all" piece of software. Maybe if they were to go back to the roots of Firefox by making it lean and having many of the standard features converted back to plugins or extensions. More difficult to maintain, but it would make it easier for power-users to customize their experience while, if a good selection was made by default, still be easy for those that want things to just work. Just my thoughts on the matter.
They don't need to ask the internet. The internet will let them know regardless.
I've been away from Slashdot for a while. Lots of haters on this story, which is normal for Slashdot, but there aren't any insightful or interesting or funny comments. Have the last few nerds left this website or am I just looking at the wrong story?
If they went, where did the nerds go?
I took a look and I can't believe companies still waste thousands of dollars on "concepts" logos like this. All but one gave me nausea so much they looked bad/dated(especially no2) and the only one that didn't isn't worth the thousands of dollars they surely paid for it, because, let's face it, we could all have come up with it (Mozi//a) Stick with your current one, none of those are better IMO
As any art dealer will tell you, a quality painting always looks much better inside a flashy florescent pink frame! Thank you Mozilla. Definitely don't start focusing on delivering content in a simple or efficient way. It's all about presentation.
I miss 3.6 and Mozilla that wasn't overrun with this crap.
This idea has as much relevancy as any other idea for updating Firefox I have heard recently.
Mozilla's problem is not with its logo. How much lower does the Firefox marketshare have to drop before someone at Mozilla gets a clue?
Ok, there is only 1 that doesn't look atrocious, the "Moz://a". The rest look like what I would expect from what grade schoolers class assignment.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
...is my suggestion for a new name.
In the music industry, when a band runs out of ideas, "Greatest Hits" album is released.
In the software industry, when you run out of ideas, you just change the look of your product.
Here is an idea for you: design your product so that it fucking stays on the content the user is looking at, rather than jumping all over the fucking place when graphics/ads load!! If more content needs to come on, simply grow it above or below the content in the window itself, without moving the displayed content.
Work on THAT for a while. Leave the look alone.
Just do what they've been doing for the product: see what Google is doing for Chrome and copy that.
More seriously, why?
Also, I imagine they're paying someone to do this, along with paying developers to shoehorn in features (basically) no one is asking for, wants, uses and have to figure out how to disable with each new release. How about channeling that money to useful, productive product development - and some of it for Thunderbird -- instead of looking to ditch it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Rebranding and image polishing are undertaken only when a company knows that things aren't going too well for them. Many Firefox users would probably agree with that, at least the technical users know it all too clearly.
However, the problems are not caused by the brand being unsavoury or the image tarnished. The brand and image are fine. Where problems have appeared it is because Mozilla developers have been forcing unwanted change on their users, forcing them continually to find remedial fixes to preserve friendly and productive old functionality. Browsers are not kettles, people don't want a completely different look each year.
The fact that Mozilla is now undertaking brand and image refurbishment clearly indicates the nature of the problem. The immense and unbridled ego of Firefox developers has put them in complete denial that Mozilla's problems are caused by them and them alone, and that has left their management with only one alternative, to play with branding and image.
It will achieve nothing of substance.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
No awesomebar, bring back tab groups and the addon bar.
And use the money on making a better browser. Stop shuffling.
They looks like they were designed for some geocities page in the mid 90's
Just leave Seamonkey the way it is. Security updates are fine, but don't change the UI.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Agreed. My take on the set:
1. In 1985 it would have been cool.
2. So you're hosting the Olympics?
3. Mozilla is a media player?
4. Bland but tolerable
5. Mozilla is a CAD program?
6. In 1995 it still wouldn't have been cool.
7. Wait, that's a Monument Valley map.
I'd suggest a simple but stylized M, with understated modern aesthetics and not the pop art of #6. People aren't looking for whimsy in an app they'll use for banking.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Dump the Mozilla name completely. The 'normies' you're trying to target don't know what it means, let alone how to pronounce it ("Moe-zee-ya?").
You're welcome and I will be sending my bill, which will be about a tenth of what you've thrown away on these 'Style Maker' wankers, which I bet is easily in the mid to high six-figures.
Non-profit, indeed.
Thank you for the challenge to IE you once provided, and thank you for making it very clear that I need not waste my time in the future seeing if you've moved Firefox back in a positive direction. You've made it crystal clear that you will not, and probably cannot.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
The SF Castro district is not representative of the global user base nor is helping politicians win elections. So do the world a favour and keep that shit out of my web browser logo.
First one is unreadable. 2nd one is just some squiggles, 3rd one makes me think of intel for some reason, 6th one i'm sure is the logo of a game engine but if not made me think of unity, 7th one is just painful to look at and the 8th is just random crap.
Reminds me of the eye of Sauron which is fitting for a browser that's constantly calling home.
...but it's still a pig.
Number 2 was so utterly craptastic, it could be the final nail in the Mozilla coffin.
OSS has tools with names such as Gnu, Gimp, Postresql, Vuze, Ogg Vorbis, and Troff. I don't see Boaty McBoatface being any worse.
Names that sound like alien medical conditions and bodily fluids actually seem to give OSS tools "street cred", due to being names corporations would typically reject. They are nerdily refreshing after dealing with names like "Excel", "Power Point", "Share Point", "Synergy Dealmaker Pro" (okay, I made the last one up, but I bet The Suits floated it.)
Table-ized A.I.
What are these people doing? Do they pay people to do or look at this s---?
People at Mozilla, get back to work, put your heads down, do something great.
Forget about the new logo. I already have.
That's all.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Clearly the answer is Harambe...
Used to use Firefox primarily but then whatever version they introduced the "action" bar or whatever it was called was when I was irritated. Then a few updated versions later got too frustrated by all of the constant UI changes and heard about Pale Moon. Swapped and have never looked back and glad I did.
Unfortunately, I've noticed with the last two updates to Pale moon, I've noticed that the built-in search bar (next to the URL/address bar) keeps getting reset to the now default "DuckGoGo" search engine and not Google. You have to manually add Google to it each time which worries me a bit... /please don't turn into Firefox...
Why does the Lizard Eye logo look like a Fleshlight?
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/jb_Mozilla_A_eye_1-1400x990.jpg
Maybe what we need is Javascript sandboxing that can pause scripts in tabs without focus, limit CPU usage, autokill pages, and so on. I have no idea whether the engine is buggy or the site code is buggy or the frameworks are broken or whatever, but if it hasn't been fixed yet, then we need a drastic solution.
1. Stop firing people for bullshit offenses to Social Justice Warrior sensibilities.
2. When you automatically restore multiple windows after crashes, load the freaking close button controls before anything else.
to Browsey McBrowserface.
1: Put off branding until their have their actual products well defined.
2: Stop shoving their nose so far up Google's nether-sphicter. They want their OWN products, not Google also-rans.
3: Dump the fucking SJW culture. It's toxic and it's negatively impacting your products by making your development every bit as psychotic and MPD as it is.
4: Hire someone who ACTUALLY knows something about branding. Whoever's fourth cousin came up with the shit you have there needs to never be allowed near anything even RESEMBLING product branding ever again...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oblig
These designs are all completely dreadful.
https://blog.mozilla.org/opend...
...it's about Mozilla - the maker of Firefox.
Since that is the case, who gives a rat's ass?
Disclaimer: I've got a design diploma (with accolades).
The letter-logo is just fine. They should just iterate their branding a little.
Here are my quick points for the website (German layout version) alone (a new style-tile incorporating these would also be a neat base for a brand overhaul) ... The current englisch version looks boooooring btw. - it's an example of a bad iteration. Just current trendy stuff quickly ripped and remixed without a clear concept, once again half finished. ... Why don't these people just iterate an ok design to make it perfect? Why always a complete overhaul? This is non-sense.
My list: ... get an expert on this) ... Mozilla needs a presentation video of its own. Hero size, professionally done. People want Moooovieezzz! nowadays.
- Letter Logo off to the side a bit, more breathing room (hero image/video backdrop maybe?)
- Letter Logo bolder (is there an extrabold version of the font? They should move to that.)
- less clutter on the screen
- limit the palette and have it follow color theory (looks like an unfinished MS Metro rippoff - not nice)
- one radius for rounded corners and not 5 or so that I'm seeing.
- Justify left, better images, perhaps some hippster hero images (yes I know, we have enough of those already, but well done they *do* work
- 2 to 3 font sizes, not the 6 or 7 I'm seeing (bad layout design!! Together with the various radi on rounded corners the layout is a mess - a little tweaking alone would be a huge improvement)
- Flowtext font thinner.
- Flowtext fontsize smaller
- Double your whitespace. No, really, double your whitespace.
- layout backdrop coloring is so 2010 - should get a redo, limit colorset or remove it all-together and stick to base-color-palette
- We'res the Firefox Ad or the Moz equivalent?
- Nice to have: They should check with some world class webdesigners and see if they can remove or limit the "bootstrappiness" of the entire layout. People are bored of that. Perhaps limiting the use of Icons would already help a bit. Fontawesome and Co. make sense, but they're often overused and out of place. Like postmodern architecture with no sense or meaning... Maybe more to the polymer icons - those are hip, classic and work well with fresh minimalistic designs.
My 2 designer cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
holy hell, that is about the worst batch of logos I've ever seen... it looks like something I would have put together in my graphic design classes in college. I'm still no logo expert, but I think even I could come up with some better ideas.
Branding is probably not Mozilla's problem; but hey, if they want to rebrand, fine, but jeez could they use something better than that lot!
Firefox crashes on me many times a day. To keep credentials segregated I use three browsers all day long - no IE sorry. Firefox is the most brittle when it comes to generically overloaded websites. Fix that. Worrying about branding after fixes.
The logos are awful. The language of this post is awful. The post is awful. Mozilla is slowly becoming awful.
Oh what I would give to go back to the Internet of the 1990s and its denizens, far away from the bullshit artist hacks that have taken over. I wish the money had never come to this industry. And that it never became an industry.
The Eye of Sauron is a good analogy for Pocket and other stupid ideas. Maybe it can sear with flames when it sends your data away.
1. No, simply no. It makes my eyes go funny.
2. No. Cute ways to make graphics spell out a company's name is a first-year student's approach. You can do better. It looks like a QR code FFS.
3. Interesting. But what does it have to do with browsers? Is Mozilla now making robots? Or a chat app?
4. Cute. Will not be cute in about 18 months.
5. No, and see point 2 as to why. It also does not render well at 32x32.
6. Makes my eyes bleed almost as much as #1. Also will not render well at low resolutions. FFS, why do I want to recall those horrid Apple drawing programs from the pre-iMac days?
7. What? Which part of that is the logo? Is Mozilla an origami company now? It's supposed to read Mozilla? See objection to #2.
The only one that has any relevant design sensibility (note the important "relevant" part ... the open elevator door logo is sheer idiocy, unless Mozilla has bought Otis Elevator and no-one's noticed) is the fourth Moz://a, but it will get tired quickly. Cute does not last.
Now, can anyone tell me what the Mozilla logo currently is? Not the Firefox logo. Not the Thunderbird logo, but the Mozilla Foundation's logo. Anyone? Anyone? So the logo does not matter one whit. (The logo, having looked at the mozilla.org web site appears to be a lower-case "mozilla" in an attractive sans-serif font; not a bad logo, kind of bland, but lacks the iconic symbology that is regrettably so popular right now.)
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Go with your strengths, not these abysmal ones.
Revel in your geekiness and stick it to the man!
Mozilla Mczilla or another choice. But not these awful market-driven ones.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
These all suck massive amounts of ass. The ugly dinosaur head sucked, but none of these are an improvement, and will only confuse people. Also, it's unnecessary. I hope they didn't waste any donated money to this. Shouldn't effort go into making a better product, and not into a stupid logo redesign?
The wireframe one was better than most, but what really does a wireframe M have to do with anything? How is that better than just any other artistically rendered "M"? If they really wanted to go retro, they should have found a way to take any one or more of the NCSA Mosaic or Netscape logos and manipulate them into an M, showing the common heritage. Or something like that. I've lost track because I kinda don't really care about Mozilla.
WTF do they do again? Something to do with making simplistic, cartoonish, cheesy crappy dinosaur logos using low-res graphics or something?
Dropped Firefox a long time ago because of bloat. Got fed up with Crome's UI. I now use Vivaldi, even though it's got some warts.
Wasn't Firefox supposed to be the answer to Mozilla Suite's bloat? How did it wind up that Seamonkey is less bloated than Firefox?!
Instead of wasting time with a crappy new logos (that no one asked for) how about fixing your products instead so they don't suck ?
You know, based on technical merits, like you did back in the FF 2.x and 3.x days.
/sarcasm Because I'm sure a new logo will solve all your problems.
the last release was 2.40 back in March 2016, have they abandoned the project? seems like an updated browser would be released once every 2 or 3 months, and that some new and updated code from Firefox would be ported to Seamonkey, i want to know what Seamonkey's status is because i dont want to keep using it if it has been abandoned,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
to see a bunch of grumpy old bastards like me missing the internet of the '90s before it was taken over by leeching profiteering cunts.
eternal september was annoying, but the rise of google - aka "we'll rank you by how popular you already are, which will make you more popular" - was the end of an internet based on knowledge rather than popularity.
and then wikipedia stuck the knife in by redefining knowledge as whatever view has the most basement-dwellers with time to push it.
fuck, the only good thing about the internet is what it always was - a peer-to-peer internetwork for accessing other people's databases. not this centralised flowery bullshit. and fuck mozilla for sucking google's cock so deep that it thought the only way of competing with chrome was to make a pale imitation fo it. and why didnt the programmers just all resign when all the Firefox Hello type shit came out? because nobody good is in software anymore, is why.
fuck.
1st one reminds of under construction sign with a vajajay
multicolored one obviously gay
blue one would be fine with more refining, wireframe look okayish if made more simpler
blue yellow one is for win3.0 theme, the last one is KDE theme.
None put serious efforts.
I still think about Steve Job's reaction to the NEXT logo that he paid big $$$ for. It was an unvoiced, "WTF?" I think an intern might have done an equivalent job, at least in keeping the idea that "Mozilla" should somehow be read. Also, that throwback to floppy drive A was funny.
Why don't Mozilla change the browser's functionality rather? To be more like Pale Moon?
Or maybe change its name to Bloatey McBloatware...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The Moz://a one is the only one that's remotely clever and interesting, and yet... the protocol prefix, including the ://, was one of the things they got rid of (by default) in an earlier update.
So, irony.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Someone actually paid money for this? Was it someone's nephew? Can they get their money back?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
The Eye: the civil engineering company owned by Sauron.
The Connector: an educational game for toddlers (or Google’s next-gen QR code)
Open Butt(on): Napster, Return of the Vengeance.
Protocol: every time I look at it, I have this urge to hit the backspace key. Three times.
Wireframe World: nice cover for a 1980 Darkwave EP (so I guess I would go with it -- by default).
The Impossible M: MS Paint, of course. On MS Windows 2.0.
Flik Flak: sorry, I just can’t imagine anything such a design would even remotely suit.
It needs to be faster and more stable, that's it. That will solve things.
Chrome (with a single tab) is quite damn fast, really fast and generally quite stable.
I quite dislike Chrome for other reasons but it is fast.
I have a fresh install of FF Nightly on here, on a fresh install of Windows, hoping to get some snappy performance, last night at only 10 tabs this thing dropped to atrocious levels of speed, the fluctuations in performance is crazy. I've got 4 cores and 16GB use it wisely, use as much as you like as far as I'm concerned but when I click something, damn well make it react, instantly.
The problem with Moz is that it's bloated as hell.
Open a couple of pages, a video or two - 1 GB RAM.
Close them all - still 1 GB RAM.
Open a few videos, hey, it runs like a dog.
People are turning away from Moz *because it's no good*.
Changing the logo is properly tantamount to saying "we can't fix it".
You need some imagination to see Napster. I'm thinking it's Intel Centrino : blue shapes on a laptop sticker and nobody knows what it's about.
Paleo-whatnich? Digital eco-whozit? Maybe the problem is that their code is as obscure as their press release jargon.
No names have been changed because no one is innocent.
They all stink. Get your money back.....
Does that include patching things up with Brendan Eich? If not, they're just shuffling deck chairs.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Can't we vote for status quo? Because all proposals seem nonsense to me. Where has the lizard gone?
I don't know what the rest of them are trying to be, but number 3 is definitely Intel Centrino(R).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've heard that Tim Murray never gave money to BLM and he never tweated his support. He must go! Mozilla must be pure.
Probably a reference to the way that "white goods" are marketed throughout the West, kettles being an example of a normal kitchen appliance in that respect.
White goods manufacturers feel obligated to change their models continually so that there are always new models of their brand on the retailer's shelves. It has nothing at all to do with making a more perfect appliance, but only with competing in newness with other brands.
Firefox evolution is similar, driven by the developers' insatiable desire for change more than by a quest for improvement. Many of the changes create a regression, losing much-loved old features and introducing non-optional unwanted ones. This has been happening so often in recent years that Mozilla developers are commonly perceived as a threat to the usefulness of Firefox. "What will they break next?"
Microsoft has a similar disconnect with its users, clearly thinking of Windows as a kitchen appliance that has to change models continually, and its users be damned.
As others have pointed out, it isn't the logo that they have to worry about, it's how they're pissing away the value of their brand by getting as far away as possible from its roots.
Here in India, people don't know that the browser is called Firefox, they see the 'Mozilla Firefox' and simply refer to it as 'Mozilla' (I'd tell them that the Mozilla suite was a totally different product family, now represented by Seamonkey, but not as though anyone outside the Slashdot demographic cares about the distinction)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this then understand this --> You need to quit faffing around with bullshit like your logo and get process per tab working yesterday and get it out to users. That needs to be your number one priority.
Mozilla, you are the queen, please show your support!
no.
PLEASE do not make it look like Chrome,,OR edge
I was testing out Exchange 2013 on Windows 2008 r2 and Windows 2012 r2 and yet IE could not load the MS websites correctly for me to download the dependencies for Exchange 2013(prerequisites) even with the IE security enhancements disabled, I had to use firefox. So firefox is good for something.
Just saying
... are bound to become marketing executives, apparently. At any rate, anyone who thinks Mozilla has "paleotechnic origins" can safely be ignored. Even NCSA Mosaic, which is the earliest artifact you can reasonably claim as an "origin" of Mozilla, was only developed in freaking 1992. The TCP-goddamned-Internet had been around for nine years at that point. Mosaic was a contemporary of AOL for Windows and Eternal September.
Kids, lawn, &c.
And Mozilla itself, of course, is a mere teenager, as it was formed in 1998. If it's "paleo" anything, what does that make Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Micro Focus - the surviving IT companies of the 1970s - Piacenzian? And IBM presumably is Burdigalian or something.
My vote for Mozilla's new logo: http://dazedimg.dazedgroup.netdna-cdn.com/700/azure/dazed-prod/1120/0/1120288.jpg