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Mozilla Is Rebranding Firefox and Wants Your Feedback (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is rebranding Firefox. The company is asking for feedback on the new look, which will try to cover the various Firefox offerings. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover, "from easy screenshotting and file sharing to innovative ways to access the internet using voice and virtual reality." The fox with a flaming tail "doesn't offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family," Mozilla believes.
"We ruined our product and want people to give us a second look without realizing who we really are"
None of FF's users care. This is just designers + managers making busy work to justify their jobs.
If you want to rebrand Firefox and get all trendy-like, and make a whole line of experiences or whatever, just give up. Give Firefox over to Apache or somebody, focus on these apps and widgets that are going to lapse into total profitability -any day now-.
You clearly don't want to make a decent browser any more. You definitely don't want to make a decent mail client.
So why are you even expending effort on this browser you dislike?
And then claim MSFT infringed on your trademark.
Profit!
(seriously, though, when you spend time rebranding, it's usually a sign of bad things)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Or maybe people have become tired listing out all the shit the incompetent Mozilla "coders" have broken, needlessly deleted, or never fixed, over and over and over again, which is why Firefox is down the shitter in terms of userbase like never before, as there was at least a stable niche population in the past with a purpose for Firefox which sees no purpose anymore.
Just because you have name recognition with Firefox doesn't mean you should try to slap that name on every product you produce. Product awareness isn't transitive, confusion however is. I work for a company that did this, years later internally everyone still refers to the OG product with the now overarching brand, and externally customers are confused often not understanding what part of the brand they've bought. Obviously I won't name my employer but a public example might be how Microsoft used to stamp Windows on everything.
marketing wanks look for ways to justify their existence, so they rename things, create confusion and piss the hell out of customers.
The solution is to keep the names and eliminate the marketing wanks, they're as replaceable as cheap toilet paper.
Let's see, how about a browser. You know what a browser is, don't you? It's a piece of software which allows one to view web pages and maybe play some content.
A browser does not harass you with add-ons, intrude upon your privacy, hide basic functionality such that one has to tweak settings in some obscure area, or a multitude of other issues which do nothing but slow the browser's ability to render web pages because it's become a bloated sack of yak manure.
KISS. You know what it means, right? Learn it. Live it. Do it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
A person who says a logo contains things called "design tools" is one of those fucking goddamn marketing choads.
They have some use when cut up for chum, but otherwise they just rename things to justify their otherwise purposeless existence, and create confusion.
Eliminate them, keep the names people know.
When you have to "go to the people" for your brand. "What is a good brand for us because people don't understand what it is I'm doing". That's a sure sign that YOU have no idea what your business is doing.
WTF are you doing? You've spent the last few years destroying Firefox to "make it better" by removing popular and time tested features (because they're too hard to maintain) then adding features no one wants or asked for (but now you want to ask them about branding) while baking ads into the browser all the while claiming you're "saving the internet"
You're a ship without a rudder and obviously have no tech vision of your own. THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM.
Yeesh, can you imagine Steve Jobs asking "What is a good vision for my company"?
The very idea of doing this rebrand is what we have a problem with. Let's start: "the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover"
Except.... the list of things the "Firefox family of internet products covers" in the mind of almost everyone that's heard of it:
* The web browser.
If they focussed on being a damn web browser instead of whatever ecosystem of apps or services they wanted to push; we wouldn't have this conversation. Mozilla Foundation wants to put out something that ISN'T the FireFox browser? Give it another name.
Better yet, STOP WASTING TIME.
JOB DONE.
Apache foundation has done exactly this - hell, they rebranded from "Apache" to "Apache Webserver" and had all the other projects come along. Those other projects? Apache Projectname. (Apache Tomcat). JOB DONE.
... Instead of snark, how about you actually communicate what it is you have a problem with?...
That approach was tried. Mozilla's Firefox devs went and did what they wanted anyway, ignoring what the users had asked for. Any snark heading towards Firefox devs has been earned, many times over, due to the condescending user-arrogant attitude the devs have displayed.
All I want is for them to take all the features everyone doesn't use out of the browser, and move them into extensions. That was supposed to be the whole point of Firefox from the beginning, but they have lost their way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"