
Mozilla launches new brand identity - dao-
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/
======
captainmuon
I'm a bit disappointed. Mozilla makes a couple of great things (Firefox, Rust,
MDN, ...). But in contrast to their products, I have a quite bad impression of
their Foundation and/or Corporation. I don't know if it is warranted or not,
but I have the impression that they mostly exist to burn through the millions
they get from Google for setting them as default search engine. Most of the
time I hear about them, it is self-referential. Either some dispute at the
management level, or they are doing some outreach / marketing / branding
stuff.

Now this might just be my prejudice (and please don't downvote me for
admitting it :-) !) but when it comes to a "brand identity", prejudices and
impressions are important.

This new branding doesn't help at all with my perception of Mozilla. If
anything, it emphasizes the perception that Mozilla is a bloated entity
disconnected from the products I care about. That they put a nerdy "://" in
there to appeal technical means to me that they are even aware of this.

What I would have done is to go back to the early 2000s unapologetically retro
dinosaur. This was from a time when Mozilla was the underdog, when it was the
Free alternative, when it was getting better and better, and when Firefox was
invented.

Alternatively, ditch "Mozilla" and "Foundation", and rebrand as just
"Firefox". Everybody loves Firefox.

~~~
andy_ppp
I really like this redesign it's clever and interesting; it looks more modern
to my eye and makes me realise that Moz://a are all about the web. It presents
several ways in which the logo can be shortened and I had to go to the Mozilla
site to look up what the old logo was. I'll remember this new one instantly.

The way of thinking in your comment is really common... let's look backwards,
never modernise or improve things. Never make a considerably better Macbook
Pro (in terms of design anyway), BBC website (thousands of users says every
redesign is terrible and they want this back:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4832892.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4832892.stm))
or logo identity (I still rate the 2012 olympics logo -
[https://www.fastcodesign.com/1670429/the-surprisingly-
smart-...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/1670429/the-surprisingly-smart-
strategy-behind-london-s-infamous-olympic-branding)). Let's keep everything
the same or look backwards to see how we should move forward.

I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea
why they get such a bad rap; the worst thing they have done is shutting down
Persona IMO.

~~~
gcp
_I know lots of people doing interesting things at Mozilla and I have no idea
why they get such a bad rap_

The other movers in this space are for-profit corporations. Nobody's expecting
anything of them. The resulting dread leads to unrealistic and even
conflicting expectations for Mozilla.

~~~
Sylos
Yeah, that's something that I absolutely hate about journalism, or well,
rather our culture in general.

If for example Google does something bad, then that's no news worth reporting
about. It's just business as usual. And people will even defend Google, saying
that they are a company, they are supposed to do everything to maximize
profits, even if what they do is just barely scraping along the borders of
legality.

If instead Mozilla does something vaguely questionable, then most journalists
will just leap at the opportunity to report about the innocent-thought Mozilla
turning evil.

------
makecheck
This is an example of something that is neat on the surface but _completely_
blows up in practice, after even a few moments of consideration.

First, what do you ask for in a query? Will some web sites choose to say
“mozilla” and others “moz://a”, thereby splitting search traffic between the
references?

Just _typing_ something like “moz://a” (even in a comment post such as this)
might cause some sites or scrub-analyzers to assume that the text represents a
valid URL of type "moz" and try to make it clickable and resolve to that URL
type. Bonus points for the first malware to figure out how to hijack the "moz"
URL type.

What is their web site? Not "moz://a" but
"[https://www.mozilla.org"](https://www.mozilla.org"). Can anyone even type
"moz://a" or "[https://moz://a"](https://moz://a")? Can’t wait for this to
cause problems.

~~~
Vinnl
> after even a few moments of consideration

While your general point might be right, this is an unfair implication.
They've gave it plenty of consideration, considered with many, many people,
and did so all in the open:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/)

~~~
TylerE
Just because 100 people agree to jump off a bridge, it doesn't mean it's a
good idea!

~~~
aleksi
[https://xkcd.com/1170/](https://xkcd.com/1170/)

------
SunboX

                                 _  _        
                            _   / // /       
         _ __ ___   ___ ___(_) / // /_ _     
        | '_ ` _ \ / _ \_  /  / // / _` |    
        | | | | | | (_) / / _/ // / (_| |    
        |_| |_| |_|\___/___(_)//_/ \__,_|

~~~
graphememes
When it looks like this, it isn't complete shit

------
jwarzech
Wow - this is actually sort of cringey. Reminds me a lot of what aol tried to
do several years ago; manufactured coolness.
[http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_gene...](http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/aol_generation_next.php)

~~~
PerryCox
Yep, plus the announcement makes it slightly harder to download Firefox. That
seems like a bad idea to me.

~~~
dublinben
Is anyone going to www.mozilla.org to download Firefox?

~~~
heimatau
I thought I was supposed download from [http://moz://a](http://moz://a) .

I couldn't download anything. /s(aracasm)

------
wodenokoto
There has been a very long and public design process involved in this [1].
Some of the final contenders were not what I would have expected to see even
considered [2].

I think it is good that Mozilla stuck to a geeky expression.

[1]
[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/)
[2] [https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-
part/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/)

~~~
Steko
Here's my proposal: rebrand as Firefox and use the Firefox logo.

~~~
holygoat
That's actually the current state of affairs. Firefox, and Firefox-related
products, hang out under the Firefox umbrella brand. Mozilla's policy,
outreach, community, and education initiatives -- remember, Mozilla is a non-
profit -- use the Mozilla brand.

Mozilla hasn't been a product brand for a long time.

------
mc42
Though I don't personally like the color scheme, the new logo was by far the
best of their options. [0] I wish them the best of luck with their rebrand and
hope they realize that they don't need to sink their limited funding into a
redesign, but rather into making their main product( or products if you
include Rust / Servo / pdf.js / Thunderbird) functional and efficient.

Making a product that offers something that others don't attracts the gravitas
of power users that they're seemingly attempting to cater to with Dev Tools
and Firefox Developer Edition.

I digress, best of luck to the Foundation!

[0] - [https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-
part/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/now-for-the-fun-part/)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _the new logo was by far the best of their options_

The old logo was the least of their problems.

~~~
Sylos
Well, no, the old logo was practically not usable in marketing. There was
nothing really recognizable about the dinosaur, nothing which people would
connect to Mozilla, if they didn't already know the dinosaur anyways.

~~~
bobajeff
I believe he's referring to the old "mozilla" logotype logo.

------
nkkollaw
I absolutely love it. 100 times better than the old one.

Before clicking I thought it would suck, like many other rebranding efforts
I've seen semi-recently (see Yahoo!), but this looks really cool.

:// stands for internet/web, but it's also generic enough to work in other
situations IMO.

Good job.

~~~
hetfeld
Seriously? ://

~~~
nkkollaw
Well,.their logo isn't ://, it's Moz://a. I don't see a face, there.

------
pinoyyid
I'm neutral on the rebrand, but imho a rebrand needs to be accompanied by a
restructure/refocus/resomething. Otherwise it's a pointless marketing
exercise. The heyday of Mozilla was when it was the sole champion of a vendor
neutral internet, competing with IE. That battle has long since been decided
(spoiler alert: Chrome wins), but Mozilla is still fighting it, this time with
Chrome as the enemy. It really needs to go find a new battle to fight. Persona
is a great example of the kind of stuff that Mozilla should be focussed on -
vendor neutral enablers of identity, payment, security, etc etc. Why isn't
"Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project?

If we're going back in time, please bring back the original
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)#/media/File:M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_\(mascot\)#/media/File:Mozilla_boxing.gif)

~~~
callahad
> Why isn't "Let's Encrypt" a Mozilla project?

...because it already was? The whole thing started as a collaboration between
Mozilla and the EFF. Its success allowed Josh to spin it out into an
independent organization, and focus on it full-time.

There are many other fronts that Mozilla is fighting on, just less visibly:
WebAssembly, Rust, Daala/AOMedia, WebVR, etc.

Having lived through the first browser wars, I can think of few things more
important for the safety and health of the Internet than a vibrant,
competitive browser market. And with the progress being made on Servo and
Quantum, I suspect conceding to Chrome would be premature.

------
NamTaf
Good lord it's atrocious. Either I see the :/ face or I consciously feel my
brain strain to parse it in full because decades of web experience have taught
me to ignore the left side of the :// unless I'm specifically interested in
the security of the connection to the endpoint.

Using non-alphabetic characters in a logo requires a pretty careful execution.
An old ISP here used to be Optus@Home. I could parse that fine because it was
fairly balanced, relatively minimal and reads smoothly (say it out loud and it
is perfectly pronouncable, so reading it in your head is similarly
effortless).

In contrast, moz://a both looks weird (the / stand far higher than the
alphabetic characters in most fonts, there's 3 letters on one side and 1 on
the other), it's mentally taxing (how do I pronounce ://? oh wait, that's
right, I need to parse it as 'ill' when reading it in my mind's voice. I also
need to remember when focusing on it in isolation not to parse it as a smiley
like decades of internet usage has conditioned me to. This is the same effect
as when you see <3 in some maths/code and parse it as 'heart' rather than
'less than three') and it doesn't smoothly parse as a standalone thing like @
does as 'at'.

I really don't like it.

------
dijit
It doesn't speak to me.

The peppy music and over the top statements don't jive either, I consider
mozilla to be a geek brand and everything in the video is feel-good overly
generic stuff reminiscent of a poor startup intro video.

Then again, I'm not sure I'd do better. But I'm just saying.. doesn't speak to
_me_ about anything.

~~~
niftich
I happen to disagree with you despite perceiving the video itself much the
same. I don't consider myself to be someone to whom peppy tribal drumbeat,
bright neon colors, and fairly generic messages alluding to multiculturality
and betterment of humankind appeal, but I can sympathize with their ambition
of being known and perceived as an organization that champions causes with
broader implications than just technical details.

The :// is a nice nod to nerddom and a tribute to its origins, but the rest of
it tries to punch it out of its box of 'we write code and set standards and
stuff' that increasingly hasn't been the whole story.

They need something that appeals to a broad, diverse group of people who may
be tech-savvy but not have a background in tech, and whose lifestyles and
futures are at stake in the power struggle for the open web. I think this is a
rather good effort that works and is notably much, much better than any of the
other options that were under consideration in their open process.

------
threatofrain
I never thought Mozilla's logo was a problem, but now I think moz://a is kind
of cryptic and non-inviting.

~~~
Ygg2
To rephrase a game reviewer, it seems there is a stupid epidemic in Mozilla.

I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money
on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot
like rebranding Yahoo.

~~~
dao-
I don't see how this compares to Yahoo, as Mozilla hasn't been a very strong
brand to start with (as opposed to Firefox). I think the idea is to try to
better establish it as a geeky brand next to the more consumer-oriented
Firefox.

Also, in case you're referring to the Yahoo -> Altaba rebrand rather than a
former Yahoo logo change: Mozilla is keeping its name. This is just about the
logo.

~~~
Ygg2
I meant the logo change of Yahoo.

------
russellbeattie
Heh... The irony of using Tim Berners-Lee's biggest regret - the :// \- as the
main logo element is quite amusing.
[https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-
inventor-...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-
regrets-one-small-thing/)

------
sotojuan
Is there a reason they put old, dumb memes in some of their imagery?

[http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_...](http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/mozilla_2017_logo_with_imagery.jpg)

~~~
Raphmedia
They seem to be going the "internet hipster mememaster" route.

------
jlgaddis
Wow. Just... wow.

I think it's time to remove the Mozilla Foundation from the list of
organizations I donate to. Apparently they've got enough money already, if
blowing all these resources on this project is any indication.

I remember when they announced their "short list" of "concepts" several months
ago and thinking then how terrible they were. This reeks of "design by
committee" more than anything I've seen in recent times.

~~~
callahad
I believe this project was funded by the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), which is
a separate, wholly owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation
(MoFo). You can read more about MoFo at [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/)

Your donations go directly to, and stay within, the Foundation.

------
TheOneTrueKyle
I think this is what pisses me off when I see these big redesigns from
companies.

I am a front-end web developer who never wanted to be a front-end web
developer. I wanted to be a designer (UX specifically). In order to get a job
as a designer, you need a portfolio, preferably with shipped products. So I
then create said portfolio to show of my designs (which I also developed
because designs are nothing if they aren't implemented). However, with my
fancy new portfolio (and still to this day), I can't seem to find me a design
job, but I sure can find myself a front-end web position. I definitely would
be happier in life if I was a designer.

So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a
design job?

~~~
devopsproject
> So when I see shit like this, I always wonder why is it so hard to find a
> design job?

Because it faster and cheaper to pay one person to do both the design and the
work to make it a reality.

There is also a supply and demand issue. Too many designers, not enough front-
end devs (which is why you can easily find jobs as an employee)

if you want to be a designer only, I would suggest striking out on your own
and hiring out for the work you dislike.

~~~
TheOneTrueKyle
I have been working on a plan to make this happen. Soon hopefully! :)

~~~
devopsproject
good luck!

------
K0nserv
This looks very similar to the new curl logo[0]. I guess that must be
intentional as Curl and Mozilla are fairly closely tied. Daniel the lead
developer of Curl works at Mozilla. In any case I like it

0: [https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-
logo/](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/27/a-new-curl-logo/)

~~~
gcp
The :// is in fact identical, which is actually a bit weird.

~~~
tspiteri
They both use the symbols, but the design is not identical. The curl colon is
high off the baseline, while the Mozilla colon is not.

------
jdhendrickson
Never has it been more apparent that strong leadership is lacking at the
Mozilla foundation. This looks like some interns at an ad agency got the
chance to take the lead.

~~~
unethical_ban
One side project occurred that you think is unnecessary. So that means there
is no leadership? Is the person who designed this also setting technical
direction or approving new software?

~~~
dpark
Corporate rebranding is a side project now?

------
lallysingh
And this identity is Wired from the late 1990s. Not far off:
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/internet-health/) from: [http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-
biopeep/skaggs-stopbiop...](http://www.joeyskaggs.com/works/stop-
biopeep/skaggs-stopbiopeep-wired-5-98-700-2/)

~~~
128keaton
It looks..interesting. WIRED got it right, though. I feel as if grandpa
Mozilla got on iFunny and found some memes.

~~~
lallysingh
Yeah. The more I looked back at those old images, the more I realized how
measured their use of unusual design was for solid effect.

~~~
128keaton
it WAS cool not because it was, but because it wasn't, if that make sense

------
kukx
I'm curious - why the new identity was needed? And what benefits can it bring?
Currently I lean towards the opinion that it's just a mismanagement
(especially looking at the final effect). I hope it's not true, because we
really need a healthy, independent and privacy concious organization that
provides a trustworthy browser.

~~~
callahad
We're trying to bring Mozilla itself out from behind the shadow of Firefox,
almost the inverse of when RIM renamed themselves Blackberry.

------
madenine
Confusing, especially with "Moz" being one of the bigger players in the SEO
space. Google "moz://a", you're going to get mostly stuff about Moz.

Good luck dethroning an industry leader in SEO at... SEO.

~~~
fnord123
My first reaction was to enter moz://a as a uri in Firefox but it didn't work.
booo!

~~~
Navarr
I can't stop seeing it as a URI.

Why "a"? They should've just had URI fun and rebranded as moz:// (pronounced
"mahz")

moz://firefox

moz://thunderbird

the list goes on!

I guess you could have moz://a/firefox but why A? A disk drive?

~~~
chejazi
As a Chrome user I saw it and imagined it as moz://a[ll_settings] similar to
chrome://settings/

It would've been cool if something actually lived there.

------
amelius
At first sight, the :// symbol made me think it was an alternate form of the
:( emoticon.

------
marcosdumay
Oh, _visual_ identity. I was expecting some project similar to Persona.

~~~
shmerl
That was my first thought too...

------
mei0Iesh
Not that my opinion matters, but just to document it: I at first thought this
was a new project, something having to do with identity. I clicked, and saw
some messy images like someone was playing in GIMP. I looked at the logo, and
it wasn't a word, but it also made no technical sense. I tried to parse it,
but it doesn't parse. This caused me to feel discord. Then I looked at the
whole thing again, and said out loud, "What the fuck is that?"

Whatever it is, I don't like it. I didn't know Mozilla had an identity
problem. I see at the top, the title, in all lower case is, "internet for
people, not pr..." Hovering the title I see it's "not profit".

I'm sorry but that makes your identity worse to me. I remember the dinosaur
looking head with "mozilla" wasn't particularly professional, but it didn't
seem to matter. It was fine. This new one hurts my brain. The slogan sounds
like something from a teenager trying to rebel. I don't even know what it
means. Internet for people? That's what the internet is, for people. That
tells me nothing about Mozilla, except that they don't want profit. Which
makes it sound like they're going to fail, because that's not even a good
attitude to have. You profit if you're producing value and sharing it with
people in a fair way that people love.

This new identity seems to me like a grumpy uncool guy who is pissed he's
uncool so decided his New Year's resolution was to change that. This is his
makeover. His attempt to dress himself up and finally win the cool friends.
But that tells me I wasn't enough as a friend. I've used Firefox forever. I
never hated Mozilla, except I thought it was unfair when that CEO was forced
to resign over his personal beliefs. I thought that was none of my business
and nothing to do with the software. But I don't like words I c@n/t read.
Micro$oft at least looks like a letter, please don't use s/ashes and co:ons in
a w:0(o)r//d.

But whatever. Soon I'll go back to not caring like the dinosaur. I'll
recognize it from the pattern and not try to read it. Nothing much will
change. You are who you are, and a wardrobe and new attitude won't make you
popular. But good luck.

------
callahad
The formal announcement is now live at
[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/)

------
andrei_says_
I tried typing

www.moz:lla.org

in the browser but it didn't work. What am I doing wrong?

( _I_ know what I'm doing wrong but not everyone would. Typing a brand's name
in the browser in the hopes to get to their website is not illogical.)

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
You mistook the slashes ('/') for l's, try typing:

    
    
        www.moz://a.org

~~~
andrei_says_
You're right! Wait, this didn't work even more.

(It's a great day for moz.com, the first result in my region)

Humor aside, what a disaster. I love Mozilla so much, so a failure in any of
its branding aspects is painful for me.

I'm wondering, is this caused by "smart people's blindness" \-- the inability
to see the world through the eyes of less educated individuals?

In this case, presuming that

* everyone knows how urls work and the role of slashes and semicolon

* everyone knows it's "mozilla" despite substituting letters for punctuation

But Mozilla is a large organization... how did they do a full rebranding
without focus groups or at least showing it to a varied types of people.

Lastly, where's my dinosaur?

~~~
Vinnl
They did do focus groups, apparently your concern wasn't actually a problem:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/)

~~~
andrei_says_
Can you point me to the part where they considered this issue and decided it's
not a problem?

I looked at some of the blog posts but couldn't find this topic.

------
kome
:/

~~~
sgift
Using a variation of a well known smiley for "skeptical / meh" as your new
logo ... interesting choice.

~~~
pluma
The funny thing is that it's not even a stretch. "://" can easily be read as
an emphasised version of ":/" because repetition was (is?) sometimes used for
strong emphasis in traditional emotes (e.g. :))), :(((, >>:( etc).

So "://" is basically "extremely meh".

------
newscracker
I like the new Mozilla logo! I realized it's a logo and didn't type it as a
URL to see if anything would happen. But I'm not sure if people who're not
familiar with Mozilla (compared to the larger number of people familiar with
the Firefox name) would be able to read the logo and get which company it
belongs to. That's the brand marketing part, and needs to be done strongly.

For all its faults, shortcomings and failures in certain experiments, I still
love Mozilla and what it stands for!

~~~
Vinnl
They've tested it with "regular" people that fall into their target audience,
so it probably works well enough for that.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/)

------
mcbits
This design looks really old-school and amateurish, like it should be a
blinking marquee on Mozilla's first Geocities page. I personally like old-
school techie nostalgia, but I can't shake the feeling that this sort of
branding will backfire (assuming branding has any effect at all) for an
organization that pushes "progress" in many ways.

------
etjossem
From a recent Bugzilla entry: "REALLY ought to register 'moz' with IANA as
well. Otherwise it might pop up as a 'real' protocol declaration in the future
and we might have a conflict. We can just reserve the prefix so that it's not
available for general use."

I hope they do this soon.

~~~
Wyverald
Alternatively, when a protocol "moz://" does pop up, they can just register
the domain 'a'.

------
kirb
The favicon is almost identical to MSDN’s.
[https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico](https://msdn.microsoft.com/favicon.ico)

Which, now that I think of it, has an identical name to MDN anyway. Oh well.

------
hackuser
This blog post seems like a much better link to use:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/arrival/)

------
accountface
It's not very good. Very generic, too developer-centric. They had some
interesting (mostly bad) options in their exploration and they ended up with
something mediocre. I actually thought some of the best designs were cut the
earliest in the process (which is typical for design by committee).

They'd almost be better served going with one of the worse options because at
least it would have a bit more personality.

Open-source is great for a lot of things, but it's incredibly rare to find
good design in open-source spaces. This doesn't change that.

------
exolymph
This smacks of design for its own sake.

------
Andrew_Ssss
The problem is one of literalness.

Most designers (and many laypeople) will look at colon-forward-slash-forward-
slash and easily see "ill," while many people who still type in URLs and use
colons and forward slashes outside of sentences and they see those literal
characters.

It wouldn't be a problem if so many of Mozilla's target users didn't fall into
that second group.

This is a visual identity solution that is clever at first glance, and which
seems especially clever to non-technologists, but shouldn't have made it all
the way to market.

There's a series of gates similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs that a visual
design should progress. One of the first three gates, even for a logotype,
should be usability.

It seems like the new Mozilla logo fails the usability test for enough core
users to be a problem.

It's cool to see designers take chances. You live and learn.

I, personally, don't think their old identity was the thing holding them back,
but new CMOs/CDOs love a visual rebranding. Nothing says this is now MY house
more than a fresh coat of paint!

------
belvoran
Well, people will just write Mozilla... because that's what they know, and a
standard human doesn't want to learn. That's why they usually use FF for
Firefox, although it's one word, and the official abbreviation is Fx.

Promoting this change will cost millions.

I hope this is not the same case, but when I was working on lots of places,
and there was a manager who didn't have any results, he usually proposed
things like this one. Useless, not needed, confusing clients, and extremely
expensive. Then the upper management, who usually was not very technical, and
couldn't understand our changelogs, was very happy with this change. Maybe
because this was the only thing they could fully understand. This kind of
change usually was something like: changing the name of the main product, the
name of the company, or changing the official colors (which included a new
logo, new website, lots of new printed materials). Did I say that this manager
was promoted?

------
keehun
Am I missing something? They're not using it as the main icon in the header of
their main website and rather only as a little one in their footer.[0] Is this
not meant to be a big change from the status quo (which I thought was just
fine and not stagnant)?

[0]: [https://www.mozilla.org/](https://www.mozilla.org/)

~~~
callahad
The video leaked ahead of the formal announcement (which is coming in the next
hour or so).

------
zatkin
They did a pretty terrible job of getting the logo dispersed across their
entire website. Just visiting the About page will lead you back to the old
header: [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/)

------
timdeneau
The original is objectively better.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere on why you shouldn’t make design decisions
a public matter.

~~~
MichaelGG
Why is a graphic of a dinosaur objectively better?

~~~
ufo
I starter living the dinosaur a bit more when I learned about its history

[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-
hi...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-
the-mozilla-logo/)

~~~
jwilk
Pro-tip: don't click on this link. Instead, copy the URL and paste it into
location bar.

~~~
kuschku
Honestly, @dang, can we enforce that all links to jwz go through archive.org?
Then everyone could see the content, jwz wouldn’t get the unwanted traffic,
and people wouldn’t have to deal with "why did you just have a NSFW image open
at work"

~~~
narag
Would anybody mind to share the background story on this?

------
lurker69
No reference to the fox? [http://www.gagbar.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f12...](http://www.gagbar.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/06/a8ff6bc1f128f61c1ef0cc0df74bdd56.jpg)

------
aembleton
Mozilla is feeling very corporate these days. Can you remember the time when
we all chipped in so that they could get a full page advert for Firefox in the
New York Times?

I think it would help if they had less money, so that they would focus more on
their core product - a web browser.

~~~
wodenokoto
I think Rust is the second best thing to come out of Mozilla and seemingly
pretty far from what could be considered a core product (at least at
conception time)

~~~
aembleton
Good point. Rust is a good product and wouldn't have happened without them
trying different things.

------
mattl
"Selected to evoke the Courier font used as the original default in coding,
Zilla has a journalistic feel reinforcing our commitment to participate in
conversations about key issues of Internet health."

When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?

~~~
josteink
> When was the Courier font ever used as a default in any editor?

Oh boy, do we have a youngster here.

Back in the days. Before true type (freely scalable) fonts. When Windows was
based on DOS.

Even the default console font in MS DOS was courier-like.

It's not a far fetched claim. It definitely shows long roots.

Also: Show source in Firefox uses (used?) Courier iirc.

~~~
mattl
* The default console font in MS-DOS wasn't Courier like. It comes from the video hardware.

* Here's a screenshot of Windows 1.0 showing the various fonts it ships with, you'll note the Terminal font is different from Courier. [https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558](https://youtu.be/KWEsBiIxMaU?t=558) and in another video here [https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154](https://youtu.be/xiKwErpPwMs?t=154) \-- you can see Windows 1.0 Notepad using non-Courier font.

* Here's Notepad for Windows 3.1 -- [https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613](https://youtu.be/xO8eQUjjFNc?t=613)

Perhaps you'll take a break from ageism and provide some better examples?
FWIW, I'm about 2 years younger than you.

------
mxuribe
Anyone know where I can grab/download the font?

What can I say, I do like the font...and, yes, I'm one of _those people_ who
love courier and georgia-type fonts, hence my appreciation for this one.

Anyway, if anyone knows where i can grab the font files, please reply. Thanks!

~~~
chuckharmston
It should be available in the next month as they finish off the brand guide.
The partner type foundry is also expanding to include Cyrillic and Indic
character sets.

~~~
mxuribe
Great, thanks!

------
shmerl
I liked this identity quite a bit:
[http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html](http://home.mcom.com/MCOM/products_docs/index.html)

------
tbirrell
moz://a is interesting imagery as a protocol. But I still don't understand how
this is any different for them. I just see a new site.

~~~
pcunite
Makes me think of an automobile manufacture saying, "We've switched all the
gas and brake pedals with each other. You're gonna love it!"

------
edblarney
It's easy to be critical, but from a branding, identity and especially
aesthetic perspective, this is not very good.

That said, it doesn't matter very much - if the product is robust with good
APIs + they are making the other strategic decisions they need to given their
small market share, they will do ok.

That said, an exceptional consumer focused branding initiative could actually
help them quite a lot.

~~~
gcp
I assume you're being downvoted because you said "it's easy to be critical"
and then didn't go on to explain why you thought it wasn't good.

~~~
edblarney
It's actually terrible.

The logo itself isn't so bad, but the rest of it is borderline disaster. The
spot lacks originality, consistency, the creative quality is quite low.

I respect the notion of trying to mix images and forms that are obviously
inconsistent with each other - but that's a hard/risky thing to do and they
didn't pull it off. My god they have windows 'webdings' with arbitrary shapes,
odd colour effects, smiley faces. The icons are inconsistent with each other.

The sequence from the 13 second mark to the 19 second mark is up there with
the worst bits of 'professional' marketing collateral I've ever seen in any
domain.

Even the music ... it sounds like the first thing a kid put together the first
time he tried to make a rhythm sequence on garage band.

Here is a very similar sounding track (the fun/jungly rhythm line), well
produced, which has a modern, fresh feel and would fit the narrative of
whatever they were trying to do:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA0z0b7tNLg)

That track without the vocals would have been a good choice.

All of that before we get into the branding issues, and how consistently or
poignantly it promotes Mozillas actual identity - there is absolutely nothing
in that spot that directs you to what Mozilla is, or is trying to be.

Ask yourself: after you watched that, did you get any idea at all of what they
were trying to say? Even from a creative perspective?

It's gibberish.

Even the copy:

"The internet it's at the heart of what we do"

"One idea link what we do"

"Mozilla Festival/Fest"

"Mozilla maker party"

"Mozilla all hands"

"Mozilla emerging technologies"

"And spans the world"

"It works both big and small and welcomes everyone"

"For people over profit"

"Champions for a healthy internet"

"Love the internet"

WTF?

It's almost random copy.

Here's what would have worked better:

Just the logo (which is decent).

A single tag line, like: "For the people" \- which hints at the idea of
open/non-profit and 'empowerment' without having intellectualize it, and
modestly differentiates them from the 'other' browser brands.

A modern audio track, done by producers who know how to create a fresh sound,
followed zooms and cuts of actual good apps in a mozilla browser.

Now wouldn't be particularly great, but it would be simple, clean, and at
least not confusing.

That said it could have been saved with higher quality creative work.

Ironically, the site where they actually run down their branding effort, is
itself, a pretty good branding exercise unto it's own:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/](https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/)

So that is 'being critical'. I don't like to be so negative, but this spot
shouldn't have made it out.

~~~
dao-
To be honest I'm not even sure what the point of the video is. There's a lack
of context since Mozilla hasn't even announced the new logo yet in written
form -- we can expect a blog post later today.

I perceived the video as a semi-official summary from the design team showing
off their work, rather than as a Mozilla commercial.

~~~
jasonlotito
[http://www.mozilla.org](http://www.mozilla.org)

------
brianbreslin
this :// reminds me of :-/ or the shrug emoji. not really the happy face they
are aiming for. OR did I misinterpret it?

------
hubert123
This could just as well be a poster for some communist dorm room or antifa
meetup: [http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG](http://imgur.com/a/WjvPG)

I saw the others designs that they had, they were all even worse than this.
Somebody made a mistake by not firing that design firm and hiring somebody
else.

------
reallymozilla
Wait, what was wrong with their old branding? The new typeface is fine, but
that :// is cringe-worthy.

Kewl, mozilla, very kewl.

------
agumonkey
The article makes me cringe hard. Browsing the page feels a tad better.

I don't associate Mozilla with anthropoligical notions of web. To me they ship
open products that incarnates the values, not brand and aesthetics.

All in all I think it's 99% unnecessary and deviates attention from beautiful
things like rust, mdn.

------
yAnonymous
I like it, but all the rebranding doesn't matter until I see improvements in
Firefox.

------
EastSmith
I think that Mozilla should just fork Chrome, fix the privacy for everyone and
go home.

~~~
5ilv3r
mozilla is just as bad as chrome now. Checkout all the call home URLs in
about:config some time. There are dozens of features that are on by default
calling home all the time. I tried to sanitize my phone once to save
bandwidth, but ended up giving up and installing gnu icecat.

------
nishs
Will there be noticeable visual changes to Firefox as a result of the
rebranding?

~~~
dao-
AFAIK this isn't going to affect the Firefox brand nor the Firefox UI.
Coincidentally however there is a visual refresh planned for Firefox:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325171)

------
Animats
They really needed to lose the dinosaur, but this isn't an improvement.

~~~
arbitrage
The dinosaur was recognizable and unique, with a long history associated with
the company. Why did it need to change?

~~~
Nomentatus
To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs
feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at
icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like
Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for
Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is
a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a
different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton
of money.

~~~
toyg
License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was
mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean,
whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is
the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML
original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.

~~~
Nomentatus
You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as
well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and
complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It
couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated
wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the
base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of
the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That
bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license
than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I
should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing
licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who
owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I
just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-
source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful
attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.

------
pdog
Isn't there already an internet company called moz? This just looks like moz
followed by symbol swearing (#?*!).

[https://moz.com/](https://moz.com/)

------
drivingmenuts
I don't like it - it reminds me of bloomberg.com. OTOH, I've stopped using
Firefox, so, really no voice in the matter anymore.

Best of luck to them.

------
synicalx
So when you search for 'moz://a' you wind up hearing all about moz.com....

Old mate Randy is probably pretty stoked about this.

------
Groxx
Not flashy, just text.

Thank God. This might age well, and it's as trivial as it gets to create a
branded-button / link.

------
sehr
Think it looks decent, boringish logo offset by a nice little color scheme.

Won't be winning any awards, but eh

------
TheOneTrueKyle
Is the logo gone? It wasn't gone a couple of hours ago

------
kenrick95
Is this public yet? I see that the video is still unlisted.

~~~
louhike
You can go to Mozilla website as it is used now on it.

------
trhway
when your product starts to significantly fall behind and/or decline in
usability, performance and quality - rebrand. "Creative strategizing" and
"concepting" \- telltales sign of the environment there.

------
debt
i dig the rebrand. it's oddly timeless.

------
mjolk
With a side order of trying to cash-in/virtue-signal on "inclusion" (watch the
carousel and read the tone of their landing page copy) as per recent blog
posts and projects[1]. Mozilla's technology and their niche place in the
internet ecosystem put them in the "hacker", in the traditional sense of the
word, realm in (at least) my mind, where ideas matter and not identity
politics -- this rebrand sells they idea that they're more focused on
marketing and image than progress. Good luck folks, but you can keep your
politics; my default is now suspicion of your content.

1) [https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-
fallacy/](https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/) (the text,
source materials are a nightmare)

~~~
tobr
What is this term "virtue-signal" supposed to mean? I see it thrown around all
the time. It's such a vague and weird way to criticize something, but it seems
to represent something that make a lot of people very upset.

I looked at the carousel images at mozilla.org and skimmed the article about
anonymity to try to decipher what you mean, but I'm not sure what I'm looking
for. Could you be more specific – what is the "virtue signal", and why is it
so problematic?

~~~
mark_edward
Virtue signaling is term that had some scientific use but is mostly used
online by people who don't like your morals, values, etc. Accuse you of doing
if you display them at all in a public place. It's meant to be used to shut
down anything but the most bland and status quo morality, by turning the
simple act of showing any values at all into something nefarious instead
something almost universal Someone says they want to hire more women, accuse
of virtue signaling, rinse repeat. The thing is it works for literally any
normative content.

~~~
tobr
Thanks. This makes me even more curious what were the values represented by
the photos in the carousel, prompting mjolk to call them out as virtue
signalling.

~~~
mjolk
In isolation, the photos in the carousel would not lead me to believe that
Mozilla is virtue signaling as the photos are just pictures of people. The
_aggregate message_ from their ad copy and the specific choice to use loaded
terms is what made me aware that they wanted to employ this strategy.

However, to be cheeky, if you wanted to talk solely based on which photos
passed editorial approval, compare those represented to the physical
attributes of their leadership team: [https://blog.mozilla.org/press/media-
library/bios/](https://blog.mozilla.org/press/media-library/bios/)

------
dang
We changed the url from
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuLWXHgyEVw),
since HN generally prefers text to video.

------
akjainaj
I'm really appalled about how the foundation keeps burning money on frivolous
stuff like this or Firefox OS* or Persona and on the other hand they killed
Thunderbird and they have been unable to release a sandboxed Firefox or a fast
Gecko.

* I consider Firefox OS to be a frivolous waste of money because Gecko is barely bearable on a mid-range desktop computer, how did they even think of putting it in a low-end ARM CPU?

I understand guys here don't like negativity like the one in this comment, but
Mozilla being a company that asks for donations, I feel like I can complain
about what they do with them.

~~~
kbrosnan
Your donations were not used by Mozilla to develop Firefox OS or otherwise
fund it. Donations go to the Mozilla Foundation which solely focuses on
education and advocacy for an open internet. [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/issues/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/issues/)

Firefox OS development is not an active project. This has been the case for
right around a year.

~~~
akjainaj
I see.

There's a clear shortage of engineers in Mozilla projects. Why isn't the money
from donations used for that instead of political stuff?

If the guys over at Mozilla don't want to use the money for engineering
purposes, I think they should stop asking for donations and tell people to
donate to entirely political projects such as the EFF instead.

The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I
think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current
situation is.

~~~
dblohm7
> The Firefox project is literally years behind in security and performance, I
> think the Mozilla Foundation doesn't understand how critical the current
> situation is.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-
improvemen...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvements-
in-firefox-for-desktop-and-android/)

[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-
nex...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/08/02/whats-next-for-
multi-process-firefox/)

[https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-
web-a...](https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-
web-a3b7174b3c12#.qgj0m0liz)

~~~
akjainaj
How does that change anything?

Do you have (multiprocess|sandbox) enabled for all users of all platforms and
compatible with all addons?

For how many years have your competitors had that?

You're years behind, losing market share every month. You like to make it look
like it's because Google is pushing Chrome with their money, but your product
is simply inferior. And instead of getting engineers, you're wasting your
money on political stuff.

The Mozilla project is dying a sad death.

~~~
dblohm7
> And instead of getting engineers, you're wasting your money on political
> stuff.

Mozilla has never been just about shipping a browser. That "political stuff"
that you are so dismissive of is a core part of Mozilla's existence.

See the manifesto at [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/)

------
digi_owl
meh...

------
k_lander
hehe. clever.

------
mtanski
design happened

------
AaronMT
Try explaining the now largely irrelevant portion of '://' URL syntax to
someone unfamiliar. It's a struggle.

~~~
dao-
Considering that :// is not a protocol, how did you try to explain this? :>

------
pmontra
Firefox Android, typed moz://a in the search bar, tap to search. Blank page,
nothing happens.

Congratulations for the new brand. Much fashion, very SEO.

------
SFJulie
The same way a university is what a faculty becomes when it loses interest in
its student, a brand is what an open source project becomes when it loses
interests in its community.

~~~
wtbob
That right there is genius! I'm adding it to my .sig file.

------
pcunite
_We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet._

I want to be known for not being snarky on the Internet. This is accomplished
by doing, not announcing.

 _An Internet where we are all free to explore and discover and create and
innovate without barriers or limitations._

Warning: anyone who says it like this is probably going to do the exact
opposite. What they mean is: anyone who does not _disagree with us_ , is free
to explore, discover, create, and innovate. The rest will be silenced as
disruptive and harmful. Also commas are nice.

