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Mozilla, Firefox, Doge and… a squirrel?

Edited by dronon, Sonious as of 16:42
Your rating: None Average: 3.3 (7 votes)

Future Firefox, or just another Foxkeh?

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.

Two actual Mozilla-sponsored firefoxes left Knoxville for Cleveland and Garden City in 2011, though a related Twitter account lasted 'til 2012; one filmmaker won a trip to Nepal to see more.

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".
Directory mascot Curlie
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.

Comments

Your rating: None

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.

Your rating: None

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

Your rating: None

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:

  1. Chrome (47.29%)
  2. Safari (24.27%)
  3. Internet Explorer (14.87%)
  4. Firefox (4.37%)
  5. Edge (2.80%)
  6. Samsung Internet (2.41%)
  7. Opera (1.19%)
  8. Android Webview (0.84%)
  9. UC Browser (0.80%)
  10. Amazon Silk (0.38%)

The figure for IE seems dubious; it may be Tor or bots. Here are the platform statistics:

  1. Windows (38.78%)
  2. Android (26.99%)
  3. iOS (22.55%)
  4. Macintosh (7.24%)
  5. Chrome OS (2.83%)
  6. Linux (1.15%)

You can see why I spent time on improving our mobile presentation this month - it's half the views.

Your rating: None

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~

Your rating: None

If they still had a lizard mascot, maybe I would be using it. I love reptiles. Especially anthropomorphic ones.

Your rating: None

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:

  • about:compat (user-agent and CSS overrides for sites that hate foxes, and/or have terrible style - like Steam's community site, USPS, DirecTV, Lloyds Bank, Santander, Bank of America, Slack and, oddly enough, Zillow)
  • about:studies (tests being run live in production)
  • about:policies (turns out the administrator can control everything)
  • about:license (Firefox is licensed, not sold), and
  • about:telemetry (where you can see them watching)
  • about:support (lots of potentially-useful information)

And of course, there's about:mozilla - which refers to the Beast, so there was one after all.

Your rating: None

For anyone who might be interested, Curlie mentioned above as a DMOZ successor is having something of a crisis:

Unfortunately, we have some serious concerns about our ability to keep Curlie running.

So, in addition to conversations in the forum, we're going to hold a meeting this Saturday, Apr 29, 2023 at 12pm New York (6pm Paris) to discuss our options.

As it stands, there are essentially three main concerns:

not enough editors to keep the site up to date
not enough technical support to innovate and draw traffic
not enough money to cover expenses
We'd very much like your participation this Saturday to see if we can address all of these concerns.

Join with Google Meet
Link to the Forum topic

Ironically, you can't read the forum topic if your account's marked inactive, which may hint at part of the problem.

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About the author

GreenReaper (Laurence Parry)read storiescontact (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.