
Firefox: The Evolution of a Brand - migueldemoura
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/firefox-the-evolution-of-a-brand/
======
e1ven
Personally, I think this is very silly.

Firefox has a stronger brand than Mozilla, so they're calling these all
"Firefox XX"..

But Firefox doesn't have a brand as a generic set of utilities, it has a brand
as a web browser, and this weakens that.

It reminds me of the articles about "Charging for Firefox" that were released
earlier this week. If instead they had said "Mozilla is planning to offer a
co-branded Mozilla VPN", it would have been clearer, and fewer people would
have been confused about if the browser cost money.

Putting everything under the Firefox brand dilutes it to meaninglessness.

~~~
user17843
That's one aspect. The deeper problem though, is that all the other products
offered under the firefox brand are revenue failures, and no one really uses
them beyond those who already use the firefox browser anyway.

And that also explains the move. If they had a great second product, it would
stand for itself, no matter the name.

This move is a desperate attempt of saving a product that is becoming
increasingly meaningless (the browser).

\- Firefox Monitor is simply a copy of HIBP, so no innovation here. It's a
nice-to-have, and maybe would have it's use case if it was directly
implemented inside the browser.

\- Firefox Lockwise doesn't have many use cases, and apparently also not many
users. It is hard to know what kind of product it wants to be, or what kind of
problem it wants to solve, as it is no competition for the more well known
password management tools.

\- Firefox Send offers a quick way to send some files. Not bad, but already
offered by countless competitors.

So basically all three products are simply nice-to-have gimmicks, they are no
stand-alone products and they certainly don't need a branding.

They all have in common that in the current state you can't make any money
with them, and Mozilla doesn't monetize them.

What they do instead, is use each of the above services to get people to
register for a Firefox Account, in an attempt to bring people into the
"Firefox ecosystem".

And this brings us to the problem with Mozilla. They want to be part of the
big players, but they are just a 1000 employee company.

They will never establish an ecosystem.

They will never profit off the email addresses they collect with Send,
Lockwise, and Monitor.

They will not be profitable with Pocket.

Everything they do to save their brand from going under is, at the moment, a
money-losing business.

Ironically the only product that is indeed at least a stand-alone product,
namely Pocket, is not included in the re-branding.

~~~
Vinnl
The products you mention are not meant to be money-makers. They all contribute
to making internet users safe, which is part of Mozilla's mission.

\- Firefox Monitor reaches more people to minimise the adverse effects of data
leaks, and helps internet users to prevent them in the future. Potential
further integration with Firefox will help make this usable by more people.

\- Firefox Lockwise likewise can help getting the benefits of password
managers to more people.

\- Firefox Send offers a quick __and private __way to send some files.

They all also get people into the "Firefox ecosystem", reinforcing each other
and giving Mozilla more leverage to help people be part of an open and
accessible internet.

In the end, all they need to do is remain solvent while doing so - not make
money. So far, their search engine deal is sufficient for that. Hopefully
they'll find more ways to diversify their income streams, but that should
never be the the sole criterium of whether or not to run a service or produce
a product.

~~~
user17843
If the move is really not motivated by money, that would make it a very
suicidal move, as this means the Foundation holds the Corporation hostage and
uses the Corporation's long-term reputation to push products that no one
really wants.

It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk for political
moves of "keeping users safe", which I don't really know what it means, but
the image that comes to mind is that of pre-school children being protected by
overly protective helicopter parents.

I have long thought that Mozilla should essentially dissolve the Foundation,
as the Foundation under Baker is abusing the work of the corporation.
Unfortunately the Foundation holds all the power, which explains why Mozilla
is behaving so erratically.

The CEO is basically reporting to the Foundation, so the people who work for
the corporation have a boss that is not acting independent, but in the
interests of a shadowy group of people who don't even interact with the
employees. Most of the people managing the Foundation get enourmous salaries,
while some of them only appear on site a couple of times a year when it comes
to voting.

~~~
Vinnl
> this means the Foundation holds the Corporation hostage

It does; it's the sole owner.

> It means the Foundation willingly puts the business at risk

While I agree there might be a risk of diluting the brand, I wouldn't describe
that as anything near "suicidal". In any case, the business exists to support
the foundation, not the other way around. Mozilla shouldn't put its mission at
risk for business moves of "making lots of money".

> which I don't really know what it means

In the case of Monitor and Lockwise: that their passwords do not get stolen or
abused. In the case of Send: that their files are not stolen.

------
akersten
I _love_ the Firefox icon, and thought it was the new icon for the browser.
But then realized they have a separate "Firefox browser" icon instead - and
I'm also not really seeing the connection between the four icons they're
showing, other than a roughly similar color palette.

My suggestion: make the proposed "Firefox" brand icon the actual browser icon
(because it's much, much better), and unify the rest of Mozilla development
under a Mozilla brand instead of pushing Firefox up the chain to turn it into
a brand.

~~~
adrusi
I like both the Firefox and Firefox Browser icons. For myself, I'd be OK with
the abstract Firefox icon becoming the browser's icon, but I worry that it
wouldn't be as recognizable to someone scrolling through the app store. And I
want other people to use Firefox, so that Mozilla has more resources for all
their ventures.

I thought I didn't like the other icons, but they look nice in context. See:
[https://i.imgur.com/Z4laxJy.png](https://i.imgur.com/Z4laxJy.png)

The unified colorscheme of the logos does make it quite clear that the Firefox
XYZ products fall under the Firefox umbrella. I thought that the inconsistency
in shape looked off on the branding overview page, but what that page doesn't
show is that these icons aren't going to appear next to one another all at the
same size. And that makes the difference.

------
CoolGuySteve
It's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon.

I'm just waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way when elaborate neo-
rococo design lovingly handcrafted by neural networks and displayed in retina
HDR will come into vogue. The world needs more birds and gold leaf.

~~~
theandrewbailey
I'd be happy if they went back to something better resembling their 2000s logo
(finer details, more 3D):

[https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932...](https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932005)

~~~
asark
Oh wow, '05-'09's the clear peak, seeing them all near one another like that.
Every other one is worse.

------
3bodyProblem
Man, the comments here are vicious. I like it, the fox tail is pretty
recognizable. And the firefox logo looks likes it's protecting the purple
core, it's a bit softer. Can't say they made some stupid decisions regarding
pocket last few years, but with design system it feels more like they are
competing with the likes of google and facebook then just being the l33th4xor
browser that is used by someone starting sentences with "Actually, ".

Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.

~~~
nocman
I don't find them to be vicious -- just honest.

------
dlandis
I tend to not like it when companies transform the meaning of a popular brand
into a more general, "parent" brand. Why would you intentionally make the
meaning of a well-understood brand ambiguous?

In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to
download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project?
[https://hibernate.org/](https://hibernate.org/). Same question for Eclipse
([https://projects.eclipse.org/](https://projects.eclipse.org/)). They used to
be well-understood words.

~~~
Macha
Spring for a while was the worst of this. You look for spring. Then docs. Then
guides.

Now which of these guides describes the DI framework:

[https://spring.io/guides](https://spring.io/guides)

At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays:
[https://spring.io/projects](https://spring.io/projects)

------
jdofaz
I still miss the Mozilla splash screen
[http://books.mozdev.org/html/figs/moz_0607.png](http://books.mozdev.org/html/figs/moz_0607.png)

~~~
T-hawk
I love that that's still an 8-bit palette-based image. And that that's
immediately recognizable by noticing the banding and dithering in the colors.

~~~
huhtenberg
It is actually a 7-bit palette!

There are exactly 128 unique colors in the image.

------
tuscen
Closing YouTube comments section and openly mocking criticism using
"celebrities read mean tweets" style is a dick move considering that they
praise openness and kindness.

Personally I find this redesign unnecessary. The current Firefox logo is
beautiful and very recognizable. And the new logos of other sub brands look
like unrecognizable rainbow coloured spaghetti. I hardly can distinguish them
from each other.

------
novok
Yet another geometric sans flat art style sf echo chamber rebrand.

They all look so identical you would think its from one company and maybe even
art director sketching all of these out.

What is happening in design departments? Do people ostracize you if try
something different?

~~~
asark
I do think there's less risk in doing what everyone else is. It's like the
"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" of the design world. You don't have to
be as good to get positive feedback on your design, too, because trend-
following invites less scrutiny (not commenting on this log in particular,
just general laziness/poor-talent that trend following fosters). You do
something original, it better be good or you'll get crucified. Yet Another
Flat Logo? Yeah, looks great, ship it.

------
craigsmansion
"It’s a radical act to be optimistic about the future of the internet."

With half a billion dollar in revenue your radical act amounts to "be
optimistic about the future of the Internet" and share that now through a
branding exercise? No actual radical acts that would actually improve the
future of the Internet?

"We disrupt the status quo because it’s the right thing to do."

Unless the status quo is advertising, or microsoft, or google, or drm in the
w3c.

"Build better products."

Maybe start with "product", singular. Also maybe stop talking about your
browser as a "product" that needs to be peddled.

"Open. Open-minded. Open-hearted. Open source. An open book."

Not open-web though, only fuzzy and easy feel-good "open" stuff.

"The brand system is built on four pillars [..] We make transparency and a
global perspective integral to our brand [..] The Firefox brand exploration
began [..] working on the Mozilla brand identity."

What do these things even mean? Remember when driven users took out a 2-page
advertisement in a well-known newspaper to spread the word? Because you made
an awesome browser? A browser that put its users and the open web first?

"branding without walls"

Unless you were Debian, or some other distro that needed to patch your stuff
because market share is more important than getting a good browser into the
hands of as many users as possible.

~~~
user17843
Unfortunately the mozilla website is run by Marketing people nowadays. There
are many competent engineers at mozilla who probably don't believe in this
nonsense marketing mumbling, but they no longer have a word to say about how
the product is communicated.

Guess this kind of cognitive dissonance happens when a company rises from $160
to $560 million in yearly revenue within 5 years, without having to report to
anyone outside the company.

Now that the writing is on the wall for ad-tech revenue they aggressively try
to shift the narrative about themselves, because the last thing they want is
to be associated with the "evil google". Unfortunately, as long as they take
more than a million dollars every day from them, these things are just lip
service with not value.

I miss the old mozilla because it was such a great grass-roots movement but
they should have never accepted the money from google.

------
jccalhoun
Firefox articles always bring out such mean and bitter comments. I guess anger
is better than apathy but the comments about Firefox and Mozilla seem
especially pretty

~~~
mikl
Maybe that's because Mozilla is such a poorly run company. They let themselves
be overtaken by Chrome because they were busy will all sorts of stupid side
projects instead of concentrating on making a good browser.

Still today, they're burning a huge part of their budget copying services
found elsewhere and slapping Firefox branding on it.

And meanwhile, they dumped Thunderbird, a truly beloved open source project.

Mozilla is in a unique position to do some good with all the money they get
from Google, but much of the time they squander it, that's why so many are
frustrated with them.

------
timdiggerm
This is probably a good move, as "Firefox" has much better name recognition
than "Mozilla"

~~~
hackinthebochs
Does it? I've had more than one non-techy friend refer to firefox as
"Mozilla".

------
salutonmundo
Hearing a free software project talk about "branding" and "a range of products
and services" makes my eye twitch.

~~~
TheRealPomax
Free is not the same as non-profit. If Mozilla didn't work on branding, it'd
already be at 0% use.

~~~
Kaiyou
The reason their market share fell is because they made Firefox worse with
each release since 2011. If they hadn't spend so much effort in worsening
Firefox, they wouldn't be where they are now.

~~~
TheRealPomax
What a bizarre thing to say? The reason their market _share_ went down is
because Google owns Chrome and Android, and incredibly successfully marketed
(and still markets) those where it has to, and simply gets free users hand
over fist where it doesn't.

When something like Chrome happens (and it happened big, you may remember the
global advertisement campaign they ran. How much do you think that cost
them?), even if you were to increase your number of daily/weekly/monthly
active users, you'd STILL lose market share because Google can literally throw
hundreds of millions of dollars at the market and cause your market share to
go down simply because they win more new users than you. And there have been a
LOT of new users since 2011. It's easy to forget how few people were
persistently online back then, and how different sites were. IE9 had just been
released. We were still making sites that had to support IE6.

If you don't like what FF has become over the last 8 years, that's fair
enough, but calling that the reason why their share is so low is just
blatantly ignoring the actual history of the web.

~~~
Kaiyou
I never noticed any ads for Chrome. I've always been running some kind of
adblocking. Also, I started to remove Google from my life back in 2008.

The reason Firefox lost me as a user is because of what I said. It all started
to go downhill with Firefox 4.0.

------
lol768
Not personally a fan of the way they're (ab)using the browser brand for
unrelated products, but it might help with recognition from your average
person who doesn't know what Mozilla is.

------
Causality1
Is anyone else slightly bothered by the fact the browser logo is now "Fox
wrapped around generic purple circle" instead of "Fox wrapped around earth"?

~~~
Qwertystop
It's been a generic blue circle for a while.

~~~
aibara
And even before that there were just random land masses on the blue ball,
clearly not earth.

------
Spivak
The Firefox browser logo looks very good. My only complaint is that the logos
for the other services look so different that in isolation I wouldn't really
know that they're part of the same brand. The new shapes are cool but they
don't look like they're part of the same design. Like the designers had ideas
in-mind for the other services and then had to work the original logo in. I
mean Mozilla is a dinosaur and Firefox is a fox -- the rest of the logos seem
too literal. They're instantly forgettable because they just relate to their
function.

I mean a keyhole for a password manager, a magnifying glass for monitoring, a
cloud for send? Not super inspired and feel really generic. How about a nose
for Monitor, sniffing out problems, ayy? Maybe a dog pack for Send, those
little packs that hang off the sides -- have cute imagery of the fox
delivering packages. Communicates right away that it integrates with Firefox
too. Would a fox hole at the base of a tree be too much for the PW manager?
It's a safe place for sensitive things. Have a little animation of a mama fox
protecting it and scaring off predators.

------
coldtea
Everytime I see Mozilla's efforts at branding I sigh...

~~~
basic6
All they do is rebrand, I don't think any programmers work at Mozilla anymore.

~~~
mncolinlee
A total rewrite of Firefox for Android with the new GeckoView engine is going
live soon. We have close to 1,000 engineers doing impactful work on things
like engine development, Rust, WebAssembly, AV1, etc. Our designers are busy
because design really matters to getting product into hands!

~~~
nercht12
Except creating a fast browser that obeys web standards. I switched to an old
fork of Firefox that's fast and now in maintenance mode. Works fantastic.

~~~
mncolinlee
GeckoView is substantially faster than the old Gecko mobile engine, just like
Quantum/Servo did for desktop. I don't know what web standards you think are
missing.

~~~
nercht12
I'm talking about desktop version, which is still slow. I don't care about
mobile, but that's where everyone else is at I guess. _sigh_

I don't recall what web standards I had in mind at the time I wrote my
comment, sorry.

------
pookieinc
This may be off topic, but does anyone know where I can find more of these
evolutionary branding changes? I’d love to read more and have tried to google,
but wasn’t able to find a good list, thanks in advance!

~~~
plibither8
Brand New is a good resource:
[https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/](https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/)

------
Hamuko
How many branding exercises does Mozilla do? Because I swear I keep seeing it
an awful a lot.

~~~
Jaepa
Firefox is trying to to start offering paid services to diversify away from
search. I'd guessing they're trying to unify there design iconography style
for that.

------
eps
> _Tell us. We can take it._

Horrible.

Forcibly cute and overly friendly palette paired with soft and curvy lines is
the exact opposite of what one would expect from an entity behind technically
excellent pieces of precise software engineering. I usually don't have strong
opinions on redesigns (unless something is poorly kerned), but this is
completely, _way_ off. Solid Dribbble material though. Peeps there will be
ecstatic.

~~~
modernerd
Do you think “technically excellent and precise software” is the core message
they want to send?

The messages of “friendly” and “cute”/“soft” you derived from the new look are
much bigger wins for a brand building their image around friendliness and
safety.

~~~
eps
From the looks of it - no, it's certainly not.

But the only reason why Firefox enjoys its moderate surge in popularity right
now is its technological excellence, not because it's "friendly".

Besides, there's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to look friendly. It's
just they are overdoing it in a way that takes away from their tech cred. And
they also chose to do it in a very cliche style. I wasn't kidding about
Dribbble. The front page there has been choke-full of similar branding
projects for months now. They all look the same.

~~~
0az
Do power/technical users care more about branding or about features?

HN users are not the majority of Firefox's users. We are not the entire target
audience.

~~~
Kaiyou
We are the ones installing the thing on other peoples machines, though. If we
say "you will use Firefox from now", then those people (mostly relatives) will
be forced to do just that.

------
undoware
I'm an engineer who used to work in comms (yes, the reverse path can occur).

While I sympathize with the folks who feel like this dilutes a nearly holy
symbol/brand with a bunch of needless cruft, the unreformed, unrepentant
marketing devil in me acknowledges that this is a Good Move and I wish I had
thought of it.

------
newscracker
So the browser icon still has the Fox! I’m relieved and happy.

The rest of the icons look fine to me, though I do agree that using Firefox as
the name for every service from Mozilla may dilute its value as well as cause
some confusion for people who are vaguely familiar with Firefox the browser.

------
jasonhansel
I honestly think there's a case for renaming Mozilla (the company) to Firefox
(which is, I think, far better known). This has happened before to other
companies (e.g. RIM and Panasonic come to mind) when the product name becomes
better known than the manufacturer.

------
WilliamEdward
I really preferred the browser logo looking like an actual fox and not just a
fox tail... oh well.

EDIT: the blog said the browser logo would be changed too, i figured to the
same one as the parent logo. I didn't just skip over the article.

~~~
tyingq
Scroll down the page a bit.

~~~
WilliamEdward
My mistake, the blog said the browser logo would be changed so i assumed it
was to this.

------
musicale
Firefox: the ongoing compromise and crapification of what started as a a very
sensible and obvious idea - make a web browser that serves users rather than
corporations and advertisers!

------
bgribble
It has always annoyed me that they call the product "Firefox" but the animal
in the branding is a red fox and not a firefox. The firefox (aka red panda) is
a totally different animal more closely related to a raccoon than to a fox.
They look enough alike that it could easily have been an actual firefox in the
logo but they go out of their way to give cues that it's a red fox.

shrug

~~~
bad_good_guy
I think you are too literal. Its a fox made of fire, not just a red fox.

~~~
Diti
I wish Mozilla embraced the red panda instead of the fox.

------
mikl
Today in stupid, pointless redesigns: Mozilla destroys one of the best icons
out there, replaces the Firefox logo with a generic swirly likeness of it.

Mozilla should fire their design department and shut down all the stupid side
projects. Just make a good browser, that's all we're asking for.

~~~
asark
The trouble is just doing that—yes, even in this modern world of wildly
complicated and huge Web standards—wouldn't require anything like the staff
and funding they have now. That'd come with a large-double-digits-percentage
layoff of staff. Won't happen. Probably they'd have trouble winding back down
to just making a good browser now even if their funding dropped to a point
that it couldn't sustain their current, expensive, useless fucking about, due
to all the organizational death-throes that'd happen.

Remember when Mozilla kinda sucked and were famous bumblers, as an
organization, but that little Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox team managed to revive
it by producing a great browser that soon ate the entire brand, it was so
good, and the organization (improbably!) had enough collective sense to foster
that rather than kill it? That's probably the best outcome we can still hope
for. IDK if they're organizationally capable of letting that happen anymore,
or which quarter of the current Mozilla organization such a thing (whatever it
might be) would come from.

~~~
mikl
Assuming you're correct, there's plenty of useful stuff they could do with the
extra money. Further development of Rust, revive Thunderbird, support web
tech, come up with something that makes Google's AMP irrelevant.

And of course, put some money in the bank for leaner times.

------
adultSwim
Disappointing seeing marketing language and thinking. Firefox is good because
Mozilla is better than a company.

------
RenRav
I really dislike the quantum color palette, everything looks like a glow-in-
the-dark poster.

------
steve_taylor
Everyone needs a job, I suppose.

------
Haga
Yes, first you pretend to be a buisness, then you are a business, then you
sell out. The dark side of the force knows many secrets, for example reviving
past successes by selling your soul. Let the longing flow through you..

------
bad_good_guy
Nothing puts me off adopting Firefox as a main browser more than Mozilla and
their constant poor decisions.

------
Touche
Anyone else getting "Connection is not secure" warning for this site, in
Firefox?

Hopefully they'll at least appreciate the irony in a blog post positioning
themselves as being about privacy.

~~~
sciurus
No, I don't get any errors.

Are you using any proxies, antivirus, etc that might interfere with your web
traffic?

[https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls](https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/blog.mozilla.org#tls)

~~~
Touche
It's now showing as secure in Firefox for me, but still insecure in Chrome. I
wonder if something is going on with the certificate...

~~~
rnotaro
It's a _Let 's Encrypt Authority X3_ certificate for _blog.mozilla.org_.

The Certificate is valid from‎ _August ‎31, ‎2019 2:31:34 PM_ to ‎ _June ‎2,
‎2019 2:31:34 PM_.

Potential issues with your system:

\-- MITM attack?

\-- Your antivirus is intercepting your browser traffic but doesn't have a
valid certificate?

\-- Invalid System time?

You could give us the error message you get instead of a generic comment on
HN.

~~~
neogodless
For anyone that's confused like me, Period of Validity

Begins On June 2, 2019

Ends on August 31, 2019

~~~
rnotaro
You're right and it's too late to edit it.

