Thursday, December 5th 2024
Mozilla Rebrands, Reaffirms its Mission To Protect Open Web Despite Advocacy Team Layoffs
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Mozilla's entire advocacy team was caught in a round of layoffs, leading to speculation that Mozilla would be giving up its advocacy entirely, shifting to a more commercial focus. Now, with the announcement of Mozilla's new branding, aside from updating the brand's look, it seems as though the Firefox company wants to reassure users of its software that it is still dedicated to its mission to "keep the internet free, open, and accessible." The new branding strategy includes a new logo, typeface family, new icons, a T. rex mascot, and new colors.
The new branding push from Mozilla sees the brand move an appearance seemingly inspired by both its history and the text-based OS interfaces of the early years of computing. For the rebranding, Mozilla partnered with design firm JKR (Jones Knowles Ritchie), and the new branding features a cutesy DOS-style flag that doubles as a T. rex, hinting to past Mozilla logos. In the announcement of the rebranding, boldly titled "Reclaim the internet: Mozilla's rebrand for the next era of tech," Mozilla emphasizes that the new look is meant to convey the company's intention throughout its whole ecosystem of products. It seems as though Mozilla is trying to remind everyone that it's work towards a more open internet extends beyond just the advocacy team it recently laid off.
Mozilla says that its aim is to provide internet products and services that put privacy and people first:
Sources:
Mozilla, JKR
The new branding push from Mozilla sees the brand move an appearance seemingly inspired by both its history and the text-based OS interfaces of the early years of computing. For the rebranding, Mozilla partnered with design firm JKR (Jones Knowles Ritchie), and the new branding features a cutesy DOS-style flag that doubles as a T. rex, hinting to past Mozilla logos. In the announcement of the rebranding, boldly titled "Reclaim the internet: Mozilla's rebrand for the next era of tech," Mozilla emphasizes that the new look is meant to convey the company's intention throughout its whole ecosystem of products. It seems as though Mozilla is trying to remind everyone that it's work towards a more open internet extends beyond just the advocacy team it recently laid off.
In a time of privacy breaches, AI challenges and misinformation, this transformation is all about rallying people to take back control of their time, individual expression, privacy, community and sense of wonder.It's been public knowledge for a while that Mozilla isn't in the best situation when it comes to finances, hence the need for the aforementioned layoffs, and the non-profit could be trying to incorporate some of the work previously done by the advocacy team into the regular company's operations, and the messaging of the new branding appears to be how it aims to do that.
At the heart of this transformation is making sure people know Mozilla for its broader impact, as well as Firefox. Our new brand strategy and expression embody our role as a leader in digital rights and innovation, putting people over profits through privacy-preserving products, open-source developer tools, and community-building efforts.Read Mozilla's full briefing on the new brand identity on the organization's blog. Design firm JKR also has a write-up with some of the more artistic justifications included there.
49 Comments on Mozilla Rebrands, Reaffirms its Mission To Protect Open Web Despite Advocacy Team Layoffs
I don't much care for the corporate identity... in fact, if anything, Mozilla being a community effort is a big reason to use Firefox, otherwise just go and download Opera... any flavor of it. It's a better and faster browser than Firefox would ever hope to be; the only things that make Firefox what it is are its open-source transparency and extensibility.Exactly... it'll take more than a half-hearted "brand identity reimagination" to make them stop getting massacred by the Chromium engine browsers. The market share is 2.2% and declining, I increasingly feel like a Netscape Navigator user in the last days it's been around. I've had sites turn me away for using Firefox too...
People and FTC are hemming and humming about how Google maybe possibly should be broken up and the Search part spun off, but really, that’s not the reason fully for their web dominance. I genuinely believe that the entire Chromium project should be ripped out of their hands and fully placed under the control of a non-profit foundation. Companies can make shit based on that all they want, but Google genuinely has too much input and control and the bare Chromium browser feels like it’s deliberately being held back. Like, it still having no auto-update feature and a lack of codecs feels like a purposeful “don’t use that, normie user, use Chrome” ploy.
The key issue is that Chromium is open-source free software (with a few blobs designed to work with it being either closed or source-available proprietary software), that really slows down any discussion on the insane dominance it has in the web browser market, since the "they're not pointing a gun to your head, are they" argument kicks in by default. The largest majority of alternate browsers, free, source-available or closed proprietary, from Brave to Opera to Vivaldi and yes, even Microsoft Edge all rely on Chromium... that leaves Firefox's Gecko web engine and Apple's WebKit as the alternatives.. The only reason WebKit stood up to Chromium is the low footprint for embedded applications (PlayStation uses it, as far back as the PS3, for example) and sheer volume of iOS devices out there where its use is enforced in both Safari and third-party browsers (including Firefox for iOS). Smaller engines, like Opera's Presto, are ancient history by now. To further complicate the whole "break up Google" proposal, they've already preemptively done so by making Google just one of Alphabet Inc.'s businesses... strengthening their grip and control on the situation.
There is one browser that I used to like which is a multi-engine solution called Lunascape, it can display webpages in Gecko, WebKit and Trident (which was Internet Explorer 11's engine) unfortunately it is proprietary and developed by a very small Japanese company which has exchanged hands recently (into a crypto corporation no less) and only receives updates very, very rarely, I think the last one is from June 2023 which is eons ago in internet time.
The only reason Gecko and WebKit still survive is vague competition reasons for the former and sheer Apple stubbornness coupled with their significant pull for the latter.
@AnotherReader
That’s a fair point, but let’s be real - Firefox is mostly a tech nerds toy nowadays. Normies are either on Chrome or on whatever is the default browser for their device of choice. In case of desktops it’s increasingly Edge, which is just Chrome under another sauce, and I don’t think anyone can argue that MS dominance (potentially) over Google is any better.
My source for the low market share was this... it's a bit old and been a while since I read it, but I wonder if the Firefox market share also accounts for its clone browsers (like GNU IceCat or Pale Moon)
www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/the-fall-of-firefox-mozillas-once-popular-web-browser-slides-into-irrelevance/
I have no interest in supporting a company that can’t manage money.
It works on Edge, though
If colors are funky, that's just because HDR screenshots into SDR for the forum.Mozilla still takes millions yearly to make Google the default search engine. If anything, Google is what keeps Mozilla afloat, it's rather perverse if you think about it.
These days I'm daily driving Edge on all devices just because I was curious if it was any good & it's been hassle-free so I haven't stopped using it. So I'm part of the problem, but I don't feel like it's up to me to fix it, as will 99.9% of users, so back to my opening point of I just don't see a way this turns around. Like high street shopping, I expect Firefox will be a rarity within a few years :(
Oh, right, because Firefox is controlled opposition at this point.
For anyone that thinks Firefox cares about their end users, good time to put this here
digdeeper.club/articles/mozilla.xhtml#intro
I clearly remember the last one involving stupid shit like this was when Mitchell Baker was running everything into the ground and it got revealed she was being paid tens of millions of dollars to do it.
Its basically Chrome, Firefox, and Safari as the three players.