While I don't like the branding move at all, I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous. Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast? No, because people aren't complete idiots. Those that are going to know/care about Mozilla will be able to tell it's a little web reference nestled inside the logo and that it still reads "Mozilla".
The difference is that Verizon-Checkmark is clearly an invalid interpretation - the checkmark is obviously decorative.
Mozilla's new logo was chosen specifically due to the double meaning, the similarity between the symbols :// and the glyphs "ill".
The ambiguity is what makes it "clever", and it's kind of an in-joke that most non-tech people, who've never heard of "Mozilla" as such, won't immediately register. They'll read the characters literally and say "moz://a? Is that a new computer thing?"
I don't think that's an idiotic response at all.
This is a bad generic logo merely because it doesn't clearly communicate their company's identity in a unique and obvious way, which is the sole function of a logo in the first place. I could see this rendering appearing at some hacker events or on t-shirts, but IMO it makes no sense to use it as a generic logo.
I don't even want to think about the nightmare of accidentally rendering the string "moz://a" in a typeface that the lawyers consider too similar to that used in the logo.
Sure, people will almost definitely not call them "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a", but I could easily see a lot of people shortening the whole thing to just Moz. The :// in a url acts as a separator, so the important bits are whatever come before and after it. All there is after it is an "a" which isn't very informative, so my eyes are drawn to "moz" instead. Which isn't ideal because a company named Moz already exists and has no connection to Mozilla whatsoever.
Maybe less technical people who aren't used to seeing full urls won't have the same reaction, but in that case you've still got a problem because they probably won't already know who Mozilla is and it's kind of a leap to go from Moz://a to Mozilla without already knowing the name.
I was unaware that it spelled out Mozilla until a news article explained it for me. Reading : as "i" is incredibly unnatural to me, and I still don't read it as Mozilla. I see it and parse it as "the company in charge of Firefox."
If asked to pronounce it, without news articles telling me to say "Mozilla", I'd be 100% uncertain of what to say.
Oftentimes when reading something with a lot of symbols in it, I just remove the symbols and pronounce it as if the name were a sentence. Quick example: writing emacs lisp, I see 'global-set-key' and think "Global set key", as if someone were reading it out. Thus the new name isn't moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a, which would be ridiculous, but 'Mozza', which is much more plausible but equally detrimental, eg the logo is still being misinterpreted.
Reading that article from Brand New someone posted further down, I found myself wondering briefly what "Dressed to K" meant... Maybe I just have "a complete lack of imagination or willingness to adapt" [0], but somehow I think it's not entirely my fault.
> I think the concern that people will start calling them moz-colon-forward-slash-forwadslash-a is a little ridiculous
Honestly, I'd be happier if someone called it "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwardslash-a" instead of calling it "moz-colon-backslash-backslash-a". I've seen so many people mix up slash (forward slash) and backslash!
Seems like you conflate idiocy with pre-existing exposure to a brand's proper spelling.
While I see the value of this sentiment, the brands you mentioned have branding efforts that so far overspend mozilla's that the comparison is barely relevant.
Also, typing www.mo://a.org in a browser presents a serious problem.
I read "mozza", then I "got" the web reference, and immediately disliked it. I don't really understand how moz://a is better than Mozilla, but I don't categorically oppose it either.
New branding is fine but the choice here is a bit more debatable than the examples you point out, where each of the brand names are spelled 100% with the alphabet. In OP, 3 characters in 7 are not letters.
Edit: Maybe Mozilla could have suggested an addition to UTF-8 and used that new stylized character "://"?
> Is Sony's line of laptops Analog Wave One Zero? Is Verizon Verizoncheckmark? Is Johnson & Johnson Johnson ampersand Johnson? Is Comcast CComcast?
I think that a problem with all these examples is that, with the exception of "Johnson & Johnson" (where people do read '&' as it is commonly read, as 'and' rather than the name of the symbol), the decoration isn't, in fact, part of the name, so that people who ignore it correctly understand the name; whereas the decoration in moz://a is part of the name, and is not read as it would be in other contexts ('colon slash slash', back when people read full URLs aloud, slowly and awkwardly—remember those days?).
One of the comments there makes a good point - they should really register `moz://` as a protocol, otherwise someone will grab that at some point and cause endless confusion.
On the other hand, "we used this for branding" is really not a great justification for registering a new protocol, is it...
It may not be the best reason, but aren't there already dozens of highly product-specific schemes in use? (such as steam:, unreal:, chrome: in Firefox, chrome: in Chrome - with completely different semantics -, view-source: etc etc)
They registered it. That doesn't mean other browsers will implement it. In fact, if I were on Chrome or IE, I'd make sure "moz://a" either redirects to my own feature-page or leave it as it is (i.e. google search leading to shady SEO business moz.com).
Until now I didn't realize Mozilla changed their logo. Now I've seen it the typographer in me cries… The whole purpose of text is to _unambigously_ convey information. So either Mozilla now rebrands themself as
moz-colon-slash-slash
or they now live with a significant portion of typography-anal nerds who dislike that logo.
Good ideas for some http processing libraries. We already have httpotion and httpoison for Elixir and httparty for Ruby. A pill has its place between them.
Seriously, I disliked all 4 logos that made to Mozilla's shortlist. Moz://a wasn't the worst one graphically, but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right. However I'll keep using Firefox. Hopefully they won't waste many energies into this bug.
That's actually a great idea for how to dictate urls over the phone, I'm adopting it to whenever I need to dicatate a url to someone who doesn't know that URLs start with an implied "httpill" but is familiar with mozilla's logo. erm.
I hadn't been aware of the new logo until today, so I didn't have any context for what "moz://a" might mean.
After googling about it, and seeing the new logo, I realize that, in the logo, the bottom of the colon, and the bottom of the slashes, lines up with the bottom of the rest of the text.
Conversely, in my system's default font, the colon rises a bit above the bottom of the line, and the slashes descend below it.
When I saw the new logo, I at least was able to read 'mozilla' without squinting, and without confusion, while also seeing the double-meaning of 'moz://a'.
Note that the logo's rendering does not change the name's spelling. It's still "Mozilla", in the same way that it's Apple (not [apple emoticon]), and Google, not <blue>G</blue><red>o</red><yellow>o</yellow>...
It wasn't my favorite concept at first, but after they refined it to what it is now, I am honestly in awe. I thought the process was bold and refreshing to begin with, but the fact that they arrived at such an excellent identity makes it all the more amazing. The fact that the logo incorporates a URL scheme is genius and perfect. The new zilla font is dope too.
It's a cool concept - but surely there are a lot of regexps our there that will now trigger in vain.
Also search engines will index "moz://a" as a different thing than "mozilla". Likely, the first will be indexed as ["moz", ":", "/", "/", "a"] and the punctuation likely be thrown out, resulting in matches for "moz" and "a".
If someone actually links to moz://a, some crawlers might pick it up. But as a crawler has to parse the url and extract the scheme before it can continue, I don't see potential for confusion. Likely, "moz" wouldn't be in the list of supported schemes and the link would simply be dropped.
Why would a search engine index something that is just a local easter egg in the client software? It's not a real protocol, it will definitely redirect to an http website.
Of course they do, and that work continued while other people worked on the rebranding. Also, and more importantly, maintaining an up-to-date brand keeps Mozilla relevant and (hopefully) stops them looking like a throwback to a past era (like, say, Yahoo!). Mozilla needs to do many things to remain an important force on the web. Keeping it's brand is one aspect of that work.
They are very aware it seems based on my observations over the last few years and while I don't agree with everything they do I defend their right to spend a tiny fraction of their time on a logo.
- after all it seems logo, ui and pixel polish etc matters a whole lot more to a lot of people than it does to me so it might be well worth updating.
Me? As long as extensions work and they don't copy too much more (bad imo) ideas like hidden menus and hamburger from Chrome and Mac they are still easily my favourite.
Oh, and they have created a new systems programming language that has managed to exite me and a lot of others here on the northeastern side of the Internet.
People keep talking about Mozilla like it's the engineering wing of the EFF, that it's tirelessly working on a mission of Internet freedom, etc.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I see:
(1) a team of developers, incrementally maintaining a codebase that that was donated by a 1990's commercial entity, and
(2) some second-tier marketing types, burning through Google/Yahoo money and padding their resumes with random "me too" projects that don't last very long.
The flagship browser has only had one major re-think since Netscape's demise, and that re-think was, "We should make its UI and dev cycle look like Chrome's". The most significant "new" project dreamed up by the marketing types was a me-too Android alternative, which they then almost immediately canceled.
The only noteworthy and truly innovative things I can think of coming out of Mozilla have been Rust and Persona, and the latter was also quickly canceled (which was a shame since it's the only example I can think of that REALLY fits the mission statement they talk about).
I'm glad that Firefox is out there to prevent a Google monopoly, and I'm glad that Rust has a financial patron since it's a pretty interesting language. But if Mozilla want to be seen as some greater "force for Internet freedom", beyond just maintaining an dated and declining web browser, then a logo change won't be enough. Actually DO some other stuff without canceling it.
The :// thing is cute, but… did Mozilla really need a new logo? Their existing wordmark may not be especially distinctive, but it is familiar. And they have a distinctive symbol, too.
The new logo looks more contemporary. I'm not sure if that's good. Mozilla can be proud of its history, no?
Since Mozilla is a combination of Mosaic + Godzilla, the only good logo for them should have been a dinosaur image laid out in mosaic, that's it. This :// thing is more of a s://y marketing than anything else.
Everything around this redesign is just a clusterfuck: the process, the winner, the hacks introduced to cope with it, the SEO fail, the loss of identity...
[+] [-] toxican|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wott|9 years ago|reply
Sweet summer child.
http://www.gentside.com/le-bon-coin/le-bon-coin-un-ordinateu...
http://i.imgur.com/4nMqG8C.png
http://www.jofogas.hu/veszprem/Sony_mio_laptop_elado_6040346...
http://archiwum.allegro.pl/oferta/sony-mio-pcg-6e1m-laptop-o...
https://www.olx.in/item/sony-wio-laptop-ID19koWZ.html
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
Mozilla's new logo was chosen specifically due to the double meaning, the similarity between the symbols :// and the glyphs "ill".
The ambiguity is what makes it "clever", and it's kind of an in-joke that most non-tech people, who've never heard of "Mozilla" as such, won't immediately register. They'll read the characters literally and say "moz://a? Is that a new computer thing?"
I don't think that's an idiotic response at all.
This is a bad generic logo merely because it doesn't clearly communicate their company's identity in a unique and obvious way, which is the sole function of a logo in the first place. I could see this rendering appearing at some hacker events or on t-shirts, but IMO it makes no sense to use it as a generic logo.
I don't even want to think about the nightmare of accidentally rendering the string "moz://a" in a typeface that the lawyers consider too similar to that used in the logo.
[+] [-] Jordrok|9 years ago|reply
Maybe less technical people who aren't used to seeing full urls won't have the same reaction, but in that case you've still got a problem because they probably won't already know who Mozilla is and it's kind of a leap to go from Moz://a to Mozilla without already knowing the name.
[+] [-] com2kid|9 years ago|reply
If asked to pronounce it, without news articles telling me to say "Mozilla", I'd be 100% uncertain of what to say.
[+] [-] subjectsigma|9 years ago|reply
Reading that article from Brand New someone posted further down, I found myself wondering briefly what "Dressed to K" meant... Maybe I just have "a complete lack of imagination or willingness to adapt" [0], but somehow I think it's not entirely my fault.
0: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo...
[+] [-] newscracker|9 years ago|reply
Honestly, I'd be happier if someone called it "moz-colon-forward-slash-forwardslash-a" instead of calling it "moz-colon-backslash-backslash-a". I've seen so many people mix up slash (forward slash) and backslash!
[+] [-] andrei_says_|9 years ago|reply
While I see the value of this sentiment, the brands you mentioned have branding efforts that so far overspend mozilla's that the comparison is barely relevant.
Also, typing www.mo://a.org in a browser presents a serious problem.
[+] [-] chm|9 years ago|reply
New branding is fine but the choice here is a bit more debatable than the examples you point out, where each of the brand names are spelled 100% with the alphabet. In OP, 3 characters in 7 are not letters.
Edit: Maybe Mozilla could have suggested an addition to UTF-8 and used that new stylized character "://"?
[+] [-] adamgravitis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devopsproject|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JadeNB|9 years ago|reply
I think that a problem with all these examples is that, with the exception of "Johnson & Johnson" (where people do read '&' as it is commonly read, as 'and' rather than the name of the symbol), the decoration isn't, in fact, part of the name, so that people who ignore it correctly understand the name; whereas the decoration in moz://a is part of the name, and is not read as it would be in other contexts ('colon slash slash', back when people read full URLs aloud, slowly and awkwardly—remember those days?).
[+] [-] cschmidt|9 years ago|reply
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo...
[+] [-] DangerousPie|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand, "we used this for branding" is really not a great justification for registering a new protocol, is it...
[+] [-] xg15|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlgaddis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] datenwolf|9 years ago|reply
moz-colon-slash-slash
or they now live with a significant portion of typography-anal nerds who dislike that logo.
[+] [-] agjmills|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|9 years ago|reply
Seriously, I disliked all 4 logos that made to Mozilla's shortlist. Moz://a wasn't the worst one graphically, but changing name to something unspeakable and ungooglable doesn't feel right. However I'll keep using Firefox. Hopefully they won't waste many energies into this bug.
[+] [-] etatoby|9 years ago|reply
kimjong://
[+] [-] SonOfLilit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legostormtroopr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Yen|9 years ago|reply
I hadn't been aware of the new logo until today, so I didn't have any context for what "moz://a" might mean.
After googling about it, and seeing the new logo, I realize that, in the logo, the bottom of the colon, and the bottom of the slashes, lines up with the bottom of the rest of the text.
Conversely, in my system's default font, the colon rises a bit above the bottom of the line, and the slashes descend below it.
When I saw the new logo, I at least was able to read 'mozilla' without squinting, and without confusion, while also seeing the double-meaning of 'moz://a'.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt4077|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamBam|9 years ago|reply
But if Apple changed their branding so that their logo was just "App/e" written out, wouldn't you expect people to type that out?
Actually, wait, we don't have to imagine. What about the Apple ][, or the Apple //e?
[+] [-] ianwalter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkjgkjy|9 years ago|reply
Also search engines will index "moz://a" as a different thing than "mozilla". Likely, the first will be indexed as ["moz", ":", "/", "/", "a"] and the punctuation likely be thrown out, resulting in matches for "moz" and "a".
[+] [-] tokenizerrr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ishaanbahal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelthelion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timendum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nstr10|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitanqild|9 years ago|reply
- after all it seems logo, ui and pixel polish etc matters a whole lot more to a lot of people than it does to me so it might be well worth updating.
Me? As long as extensions work and they don't copy too much more (bad imo) ideas like hidden menus and hamburger from Chrome and Mac they are still easily my favourite.
Oh, and they have created a new systems programming language that has managed to exite me and a lot of others here on the northeastern side of the Internet.
[+] [-] StevePerkins|9 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. I see:
(1) a team of developers, incrementally maintaining a codebase that that was donated by a 1990's commercial entity, and
(2) some second-tier marketing types, burning through Google/Yahoo money and padding their resumes with random "me too" projects that don't last very long.
The flagship browser has only had one major re-think since Netscape's demise, and that re-think was, "We should make its UI and dev cycle look like Chrome's". The most significant "new" project dreamed up by the marketing types was a me-too Android alternative, which they then almost immediately canceled.
The only noteworthy and truly innovative things I can think of coming out of Mozilla have been Rust and Persona, and the latter was also quickly canceled (which was a shame since it's the only example I can think of that REALLY fits the mission statement they talk about).
I'm glad that Firefox is out there to prevent a Google monopoly, and I'm glad that Rust has a financial patron since it's a pretty interesting language. But if Mozilla want to be seen as some greater "force for Internet freedom", beyond just maintaining an dated and declining web browser, then a logo change won't be enough. Actually DO some other stuff without canceling it.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|9 years ago|reply
The new logo looks more contemporary. I'm not sure if that's good. Mozilla can be proud of its history, no?
[+] [-] INTPenis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kolberht|9 years ago|reply
It shows how emo some of the users are.
[+] [-] acomjean|9 years ago|reply
about:mozilla
in the address bar
[+] [-] cpeterso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|9 years ago|reply
So Google got its own TLD just for marketing purposes?
Well, Mozilla got its own scheme for marketing purposes only!