This is stupid.
Tl;dr: corporate speak, just a rebrand, the new slogan suggests they want to lobby more.
Hope the corpo’s at the helm stay enough out of the way of engineering, that gecko remains. Poor mozilla engineers :(
Some excerpts:
Even though we’ve been at the forefront of privacy and open source, people weren’t getting the full picture of what we do. We were missing opportunities to connect with both new and existing users. This rebrand isn’t just a facelift — we’re laying the foundation for the next 25 years.”
We teamed up with global branding powerhouse Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) to revamp our brand.
We back people and projects that move technology, the internet and AI in the right direction. (…) With our “Reclaim the Internet” promise, a strategy built with DesignStudio in 2023, the new brand empowers people to speak up
“We intentionally designed a system, aptly named ‘Grassroots to Government,’
Hmm, so the only change is they’re adding AI to their buzzwords?
How about they stop talking to branding companies/consultants and just build better products?
Here’s a free idea: create a way for me to compensate websites without ads. I’d actually pay for the content I consumer if paying was reasonable. Instead of sitting with branding consultants, lobbying government, etc, sit with the big media orgs and figure out something that works for everyone. Do that well, and I think they could actually profit from their browser, because they’re preserving privacy w/o pissing off content orgs.
No, I had high hopes for that, but it seems Brave is happy leaving it as essentially useless.
I’m thinking something like a reloadable credit, and you’d opt in to certain sites. Mozilla would keep track of anonymized visit data and send the creators a payment every month or so. If they don’t opt in, there’s no payment, but if they do, the website would not show ads.
It could be an extension for non-Firefox browsers as well so it could have greater reach. But this would need to be done by a larger org like Mozilla to get sites on board (e.g. start with paywalled news sites), otherwise I’d try my hand at building it.
Brave could be the one to do this, but they seem obsessed with their cryptocurrency. A simple payment in regular fiat would likely be a lot more attractive, especially if it wasn’t tied to a specific browser.
How many millions did this utterly useless rebranding cost?
Why haven’t the people who decided to waste money on this rather than retaining talent gotten fired yet?
Bring the dinosaur back
The previous Moz://a Logo was just a pure genius reference to http:// and I hate that they got rid of this clever and unique logo.
At least the new one doesnt look as bland as most of the other rebrands we are seeing recently.
The old logo also looked far more professional and serious, which is exactly what you want if you’re setting yourself up as a serious alternative to Google and Chrome.
They already had a tough time becoming known, with this logo that doesn’t link well to Mozilla this is becoming even harder. If you took a random person and asked them who the new logo was for, they wouldn’t know. With the Moz://a logo, they could easily figure it out.
The chosen colours are also too harsh. The activists/hackers/whatever already likely use Firefox. It’s exactly the pond they shouldn’t be fishing in. They should focus on a brand messaging that demonstrates reliability, performance and ease-of-use, being the choice for the casual user. Because that’s the market they need to win.
