Mozilla, Firefox, Doge and… a squirrel?
Mozilla has been forced to state that the increasingly-stylized fox in their browser logo is "alive and well" — despite mounting evidence of Doge influence in Nightly, the twice-a-day distribution of Firefox code.
Their blog post was a response to a series of memes decrying the ongoing march towards minimalism, implying that a 2019 re-branding exercise – in which Firefox was turned into a 'parent brand' composed of a 'swoop' design from which the browser icon and others were derived – represented elimination of the fox from the product.
Whither Mozilla?
Mozilla was, however, silent on the fate of its original mascot – a Godzilla-like lizard, later a tyrannosaur – inspired by Netscape Navigator's codename as a "Mosaic killer". Once featured on shirts, throbbers, even a statue, its pugilistic style came to be considered unsuited for an increasingly corporate world — but it remained part of listings in DMOZ, the Open Directory. Since AOL disbanded DMOZ in March 2017, it seems it's been put out to pasture.
Edited by BunnyHugger, EarthFurst, GreenReaper, and (in German) o'wolf, with many other contributors, the DMOZ lists of general furry websites and adult-content furry sites featured footer illustrations of the lizard mascot in various situations, known as "Mozzies".
Curlie, DMOZ's spiritual successor, adopted a red squirrel and acorn as its mascot – ironic, as limiting broad-leaved trees such as the oak is key to managing grey squirrels in favour of reds – but for now it has a more limited selection of art.
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
For anyone wondering why there aren't more lizards pictured - for a start, there's so gosh-darn many. I didn't even get around to the ones used prior to their typeface-oriented rebranding. Mozilla also has an extensive trademark policy that, while perhaps unenforceable on commentary, isn't something I want to tangle with. So, want to learn more? Follow the links.
Does anyone use Mozilla these days? I mean, it did start the tabbed browsing thing, and then every browser adapted it and then moved on to Chrome or some other browser.
It's like Robinhood and commission free trades. Once you make something cool the big boys take it for their own products and go 'thanks man'.
...wait, they don't even do that...
Roo'd
Almost nobody uses Mozilla Application Suite's Navigator, or its successor SeaMonkey (based on Firefox 60 ESR).
People do use Firefox - on desktop, particularly Windows. But not as many as before; and few on mobile, for good reason. Firefox Mobile is a pain, because it doesn't use font boosting, but also doesn't end up with the same layout as the desktop version (possibly due to regular font sizes on Android vs. Windows).
Here's Flayrah's browser statistics for the last seven days:
The figure for IE seems dubious; it may be Tor or bots. Here are the platform statistics:
You can see why I spent time on improving our mobile presentation this month - it's half the views.
Uh.. yes. Been using Firefox for over a decade. Why would anyone willingly use more Google stuff? Ugh. Also Chrome has an ugly UI.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
If they still had a lizard mascot, maybe I would be using it. I love reptiles. Especially anthropomorphic ones.
There may not be lizards, but they do have robots, left over from Firefox 3.
You can see them if you use it and manually navigate to about:robots.
Other interesting tidbits at about:about - reminds me of Portal:Portal - include:
And of course, there's about:mozilla - which refers to the Beast, so there was one after all.
For anyone who might be interested, Curlie mentioned above as a DMOZ successor is having something of a crisis:
Ironically, you can't read the forum topic if your account's marked inactive, which may hint at part of the problem.
It's that time again.
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