Mozilla's New Logo Reminds Us that It Is, In Fact, a Web Firm (cnet.com)

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.

Comments

Wow

[The-Ixian]

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:Wow

[Dutch Gun]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

... good software engineering and innovation.

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

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Wow

[LinuxIsGarbage]

... good software engineering and innovation.

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"

No concern about FF's dropping market share?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't anyone at Mozilla concerned about Firefox's ever-dropping market share? 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:What are those characters?

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing I do if Firefox is installed:

1. Uninstall Firefox.
2. Install Palemoon.