Mozilla, Branding and Smoking Good Shit

Daniel Glazman has a followup post on the whole “Powered by Mozilla” thing (excellent initiative, did I mention?), which points to a droll and frustratingly anonymous rant on a new blog called “The Truth about Mozilla”.

I fell off my chair when I read that AllPeers is a “Mozpad front-company” and not just because of the incorrect hyphenation. (Save your cards, flowers and chocolates, I’m fine beyond a few psychological bumps and bruises.) That said, Mr. Anonymous does provide a reasonable if caustic counterpoint to Daniel’s and my contention that Mozilla platform developers would benefit if there were some way for them to leverage the better-known Firefox brand. (But what’s all this about Schrödinger’s cat? I’ve heard of mixing metaphors, but throwing in a physics thought experiment is a bold move. What good shit are you smoking, dude?)

Anyway, as my previous post on the topic implies, I disagree with the idea of trying to create a second trips-off-the-tongue brand out of Mozilla. Like I said, it’s hard enough to get traction with even one brand. As things stand, I must say “you know, the guys who make Firefox” about ten times a day.

And then there’s the general problem of what to call the platform. Mozilla, Gecko and XULRunner are often used interchangeably, and all of them have considerable drawbacks. Calling the platform “Firefox” is obviously problematic too, as Anonymous Mozilla Guy points out. But what about taking a feather out of BitTorrent’s cap? “Firefox DNA” is a bit me-too-ish. But something that uses the word “Firefox”, gets across the idea that “this is the stuff inside Firefox” while remaining clearly distinct from Firefox The Browser would be killer.

UPDATE: Before anyone else chastises me for “feeding the troll,” let me say in my defense that I didn’t read the earlier, more obnoxious posts on the “Truth about Mozilla” blog before linking to it. The post I link to seemed reasonable enough to me. I’d be on thin ice, after all, if I criticized his sarcastic tone and childish sense of humor (though I might plausibly demand royalties). Anyway, a lot of the posts do look like trolling, and the whole idea of a muck-raking Mozilla blog is silly, so please don’t patronize or link to his blog unless I explicitly say it’s okay.

UPDATE: Apparently it isn’t obvious that the bold portion of the previous update is tongue-in-cheek, at least if Cedric is any guide (a dubious premise, I admit). So lest it be too obtuse for some: I’m kidding!

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8 Comments »

1. Maybe things that use Gecko could be called Foxicles?

   Less sarcastically, maybe something like “based on FoxCore”, where the final “e” swoops around like the firey tail of the Firefox logo?

   Comment by Screwtape — 10/18/2007 @ 2:49 pm

2. Not sure if “FoxCore” entirely nails it, but that’s definitely the kind of thing I had in mind.

   Comment by Matt — 10/18/2007 @ 2:53 pm

3. Firefox inside just a picture of the Firefox and the word “inside”

   Made possible by Firefox?

   Comment by Michael Kaply — 10/18/2007 @ 4:17 pm

4. > “based on FoxCore”, where the final “e” swoops around like the firey tail of the Firefox logo?

   or like this: http://tinyurl.com/yslm72

   Comment by Dao — 10/18/2007 @ 6:12 pm

5. Wait, I’m confused - I thought Mozpad was a front for AllPeers! This conspiracy has too many layers!

   Ian

   Comment by Ian McKellar — 10/18/2007 @ 6:42 pm

6. Thanks for the posts…I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s thoughts on this topic.

   Regarding the notion of us creating a “second trips-off-the-tongue brand out of Mozilla”, it’s worth noting that the Mozilla brand came before Firefox so we’re not trying to create anything new here. The idea is simply to raise the visibility of the fact that Mozilla technology is powering a lot of cool stuff on the web (including Firefox).

   There were some suggestions on my blog that we should put the “powered by Mozilla” logo on the Firefox product pages, which seems like the right way to go about this to me.

   Anyway, this has been a fun discussion…looking forward to continuing it on this and other related topics.

   Comment by John — 10/18/2007 @ 7:37 pm

7. I agree, John, adding “Powered by Mozilla” to the Firefox pages is certainly a good move in any case.

   Comment by Matt — 10/19/2007 @ 9:17 am

8. What’s so bad about using DNA? All the major Mozilla brands are creatures (Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Minotaur, Gecko), and using the idea that they all have the same monstrous DNA (or Mozilla DNA, MozDNA, MoZNA, ZNA, etc.) would make it clear that the underlying platform is the same…

   Comment by Brandon — 10/19/2007 @ 10:31 pm

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