Mozilla's new branding strategy

At least there's visual continuity with the previous branding. And I'm happy to see the lizard again.

Greetings from one SUSE employee! ;)

And yes, I was re-posting a couple of days ago Cory Doctorow’s statement that “Virtually every sentence that contains the word ‘brand’ is bullshit, and that one is no exception.” I feel really worried about Mozilla that they are getting down to these gimmicks.

I am unlikely to donate to a nonprofit that spends its funds on expensive rebranding campaigns... What did they spend on this?

Their privacy stance is we aren't as bad as chrome. If privacy was really important to them several things would work differently in their browser.

The new font is neat, keeping the letter size independently of weight. The animation in article shows it clearly.

In my experience: rebranding is often the "second envelope" that the new management tries to do. And it usually ends badly. And as expected, the new brand is strange. What is that letter on the right? Greek beta? Inverted sigma? WTF?

For those who don't know, the joke is this:

A government official is retiring, and he tells his successor: "I left you three envelopes in the desk drawer. Open them one-by-one at the time of the great need".

Time passes, a crisis comes, and the successor opens the first envelope. It says: "Blame me". So he blames the retired predecessor, and for a time everything works fine.

Then another crisis comes, and he opens the second envelope. This time it's: "Start reorganization/reforms". And this indeed helps for a while.

And then eventually the time comes for the third envelope. So he opens it. And the advice is: "Prepare three envelopes".

Hard to tell whether the text was meant to be satirical, tongue-in-cheek or just a standard press release.
Starting with
> revitalize our intentions across our entire ecosystem
meaning their intentions were almost dead and needed some new life. And what are intentions across an ecosystem?
> the new brand empowers people to speak up, come together and build a happier, healthier internet
If a brand empowers people, that's quite a feat. Funnily they claimed to empower people even before this rebranding, not sure what changed now.
> At the heart of this transformation is making sure people know Mozilla for its broader impact, as well as Firefox.
That almost sounds like Firefox is not having an impact.

The flag-planting animation is certainly bold, for planting flags usually is done when land is conquered.

The "related articles" at the bottom of the rebranding announcement page are right now:
> "Celebrating 20 years of Firefox with 20 red panda cams"
> "Huwa: From a WhatsApp group to sharing Palestinian olive oil with the world"
> "La Humita: 20 years of authentic Ecuadorian flavors in Chicago"

Wondering what (surely laudable) food-related companies have to do with Mozilla, I stumbled upon this explanation quoted straight from the Mozilla website:
> Through Solo, Mozilla’s free AI-powered website creator, they’re exploring new corners of their community online.

Those are apparently the most relevant articles related to the rebranding. Mozilla surely see themselves activists, but the announcement is almost devoid of non-generic content on what they're trying to achieve.

I really hope they'll continue to ship a browser. The words "browser" and "Firefox" were mentioned only once in the whole announcement. Firefox is a really nice browser and I would love to continue using it in the future.

I find the new logo interesting. In the same time, it is hard to imagine good reasons to spend money on yet another rebranding but not on making Firefox better.