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.
I guess the common thread is that these services complement your browsing experience, i.e. they'd often be used in conjunction with Firefox - as opposed to, say, Thunderbird. But yeah, the main reason is likely the stronger Firefox brand, and the biggest risk is indeed of weakening that brand. Then again, it could bolster it as well: Firefox Send is a very useful service, and can be used to make people familiar again with Firefox as the relevance of the browser has declined.
(The specific issue with the "Charging for Firefox" articles, was, I think, that the root source of that was an interview with a German website, causing details to be lost in translation.)
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.
it's confusing only for us. for most people the browser is transparent. they say things like "should I click on google?" meaning the google chrome Icon. generally they will name the browser after whatever service is on the home page. that's the insight they are building upon
The weird thing is that Google did the same, somehow calling a "HDMI over Wifi" plug after their browser (huh?). I'll never understand these organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's kind of funny how bland the other icons are compared to the browser icon.
It's kind of striking how bland the other icons are. I just did this exercise. I rapidly scrolled the article, and I can't tell what those other icons represent.
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.
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/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
I think likewise. Even if they're willing to go to the huge effort to go through all their own documentation to make it tell the truth given the new definition of Firefox, third parties aren't going to.
The only successful example I can think of was RIM rebranding itself as Blackberry. There are probably a few others. Although they're likely all narrowing examples (company changes name to focus on single product) rather than widening ones like this.
I generally agree that that's a risk, but not a certainty. For example, I don't think many people have problems discerning Google Docs from Google Search - or at least, not many more than were it still called Writely.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Why? As a power user I'm going to just about:config all the cuteness away, so why would I care what veneer of the week they come up with? However, for my family members who have to turn on a computer to check their email because they rarely even use one, that friendly palette and cuteness is exactly what you need to go "see? it's not all work work business boring nerd stuff".
If you're a power user, you have no opinion on this new set of icons: they're irrelevant, you're never going to see them, or use them.
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.
[+] [-] e1ven|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
(The specific issue with the "Charging for Firefox" articles, was, I think, that the root source of that was an interview with a German website, causing details to be lost in translation.)
[+] [-] user17843|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akersten|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
I thought I didn't like the other icons, but they look nice in context. See: 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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox#2004.E2.80.932...
[+] [-] stcredzero|6 years ago|reply
It's kind of striking how bland the other icons are. I just did this exercise. I rapidly scrolled the article, and I can't tell what those other icons represent.
[+] [-] 3bodyProblem|6 years ago|reply
Now the important questions, where can I get the stickers for my laptop.
[+] [-] nocman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlandis|6 years ago|reply
In the Java ecosystem, Eclipse and Hibernate are examples. Do you want to download "Hibernate"? Which Hibernate project? https://hibernate.org/. Same question for Eclipse (https://projects.eclipse.org/). They used to be well-understood words.
[+] [-] Macha|6 years ago|reply
Now which of these guides describes the DI framework:
https://spring.io/guides
At least there's a Spring framework link on the Projects page nowadays: https://spring.io/projects
[+] [-] mjw1007|6 years ago|reply
I don't think it went well for Apache.
[+] [-] wvenable|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdofaz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T-hawk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuscen|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigsmansion|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikl|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kaiyou|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timdiggerm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salutonmundo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lol768|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qwertystop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nocman|6 years ago|reply
https://pasteboard.co/IiXKmDT.png
[+] [-] Spivak|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pookieinc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plibither8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaepa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmichaelhudson|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kabwj|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eps|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|6 years ago|reply
If you're a power user, you have no opinion on this new set of icons: they're irrelevant, you're never going to see them, or use them.
[+] [-] jchw|6 years ago|reply
The repulsion to anything “cute” is always perplexing to me. It comes up quite frequently when discussing branding and design.
[+] [-] boringuser1|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] undoware|6 years ago|reply
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.