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

[c]

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

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Wow

[ShanghaiBill]

In their defence, I suspect they had to test the hell out of it

Testing is not done at meetings.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Wow

[Dracos]

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: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"

Re:Wow

[Waccoon]

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.

Hmm...

[cmdr_klarg]

Not bad, IMHO. Better than some of the ideas they had a short time ago.

Colon slash slash something something

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What are those characters?

[sootman]

Funny that their logo includes "://" when Firefox itself hides those characters by default on non-https sites.

Re:What are those characters?

[Stormwatch]

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

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:No concern about FF's dropping market share?!

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet Firefox's market share has actually gone up for the past few releases, so...

Gibberish

[Stormwatch]

My brain parses "://" as gibberish and reads that logo as "moz a".

Re: Absolute insanity.

[higuita]

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

Let's me fix the headline a bit...

[Eloking]

Mozilla's New Logo Reminds Us that It Is, In Fact, a Web Firm

...and not a design firm.

Be careful when changing Logos too much.

[jellomizer]

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.

takes deep breath...

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Well... I like it!

It's a good logo.

Re:There's no logo per se

[H0p313ss]

True, but at least they stylize certain letters unlike Mozilla which hasn't done even that.

No... that's EXACTLY what they've done.

how://conceived

[gti_guy]

:///ogical too

Forget that

[jensend]

Seven months since setting out to refresh the Mozilla brand experience, weâ(TM)ve reached the summit. Thousands of emails, hundreds of meetings, dozens of concepts, and three rounds of research later, we have something to share.

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:

1. Fire everybody who wasted time on those thousands of emails and hundreds of meetings
2. Bring back Brendan Eich

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.

"Mozilla is more than just a browser"

[Chas]

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...