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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Monday, February 09, 2004

About the new Mozilla Firefox branding

Some time ago, I wrote about the childish reaction the Mozilla Foundation (then simply called Mozilla.org) had when a pre-existing open source project cried foul over its use of the Firebird name. After much public blathering, the people developing Mozilla finally quieted down, and while they never actually apologized for their appalling behavior, it's now clear what really happened: The Mozilla Foundation had to rename their browser, and that renaming was actually the reason the 0.8 release was delayed again and again.

"The process began in late November," Mozilla developer Ben Goodger writes in his blog. "Mozilla's Chief Architect Brendan Eich had made a commitment to resolve the dispute over Firebird's code name by the 0.8 milestone ... After the Christmas/New Year break, the situation played out over the following six weeks, with our lawyers in the United States and Europe as well as Bart Decrem at The Mozilla Foundation working to resolve the issues. At times it seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. We contemplated releasing under an interim name. I was optimistic however and held the release, and eventually we turned the corner and the issues were resolved."

In related news, Steven Garrity has an interesting write-up about the development of the new Firefox logo. "Our [task] is to improve the quality and consistency of the visual elements of the Mozilla products. Icons/logos, default themes, and other visual aspects of the software are all on our radar."

Designer Jon Hicks has also written up a description of the Firefox branding saga. "I then rendered [the final concept] using Fireworks MX. I’ve been using Fireworks over Illustrator or Photoshop for icon design as I love the way I can work in vectors and see the result in pixels, rather than smooth vectors. The updated gradient tools in MX make this possible too."

Finally, you can show your support of Firefox by using one of the buttons shown on the Mozilla.org Firefox buttons page.

[ Posted at 5:48 PM | Permalink ]