I wanna go back to medieval crests, where they would throw in symbology for every little detail about the family/guild/whatever. I wanna be able to know everything about a product/app just by looking at its icon.
Wow I actually love this idea. There could be some common symbol in the crests to denote what kind of open source license they follow (GNU, MIT, etc), affiliation with other software, all sorts of cool stuff.
Wow. I'm surprised at the dislike for the old detailed icon. Maybe it's being old enough to remember black and white icons, but I miss the increasing amount of colors that icons had for a while there. I hate the trend toward monocolor silhouettes.
Originally called Phoenix, since it was Netscape Navigator, reborn.
But Phoenix Technologies disliked that, so they renamed to a descriptive name for the same immortal bird -- Firebird.
The Firebird database people would have none of that, so after a few-months gap between 0.x releases, they found the closest thing they possibly could which was not trademarked. It had nothing to do with the original name idea, fire being a weak link.
And we've been stuck with that stupid name for two decades.
There was a satirical addon back in this day that would change the Firefox name every time you opened it to like WaterHippo or SunJackal to make fun of this.
I have no memory of the 2002 one and I swapped over from Netscape which is weird.. I have a vague memory of their thunderbird logo looking similar at one point but maybe I'm getting them mixed up
Didn't it used to be called Firebird or something but had to change its name due to copyright? I remember when it was v1 and seeing advertising about it in the paper. It really did start the ball rolling in getting people away from IE. Chrome then came out and dominated.
"What happened to me? People care more about polished functionality than their privacy, and are willing to trade privacy for something that steals all their data as long as it is "faster," even though I'm arguably faster than Chrome at this point..."
Most regular ass people don't give one flying fuck about being owned by corporations, they're happy to get reamed by companies that don't give a shit if they live or die.
The new one looks so much better than that overdetailed crap, I don't want a painting, I want an easily discernable icon. Also, I can't believe we're still doing Firefox so many years after its new logo debuted, especially since Thunderbird just changed their logo. In my opinion, it seems like people are just reiterating the same joke some bloke did without even looking up the why and how. And before you ask, yes I prefer the new Thunderbird logo too, it's much more discernable.
Firefox gets so much crap for the logo when it's probably the best minimalist logo there is. People just mistook the more general Firefox "brand" logo with the actual browser logo.
I understand the meme as being about the glory days (or at least closer to them) vs whatever slow, niche burn this is in the times of the new logo. Firefox is great, I wish they invested more money they’re getting into development though (they’re pretty good financially reading by the reports yet they’re… reducing development teams?).
That said I’m fed with minimalism everywhere and want the detailed, colorful icons to make a comeback :’( Firefox actually does reasonably good job design-wise in the “modern world” (with the opposites being google apps - the epitome of generic blandness). I was reading article recently on neumorphism as successor to skeuomorphism trend and I’ve fucking got my fingers crossed so hard for it to become popular.
I'm sure quite a few people can agree that we do not like the oversimplifying of logos. I know I sure as hell don't. The old logo was so much better looking if you ask me.
For real though, if it bothers you that much, I think it’s possible to change the shortcut icon on your desktop. You would have to download the old Firefox logo as an image on your computer, and then edit the properties of the Firefox shortcut to use the downloaded image of the old icon instead of the regular app icon. This won’t help for the mobile app though.
I prefer the right, simplified one on my phone. It's quicker to identify and the simple, bolder colors play better. I'd like to see the detailed one on the left on their website or something.