Mozilla ditches the dinosaur, unveils new branding only a nerd could love
The old Netscape browser had a dinosaur named Mozilla as its mascot and codename. When the browser was open sourced in 1998, it used the dinosaur's name and visage as its branding.
No longer. After a rebranding was announced in August, the final decision has now been revealed. The Mozilla Organization has a shiny new wordmark that spells out the word "mozilla" with a mix of letters and punctuation (written in a requisite custom font, named Zilla). A blog post describes how the new brand is meant to signal Mozilla's support for an open and accessible Web.
I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar treatment of the colon-slash-slash in youth-oriented TV shows to show just how with it and Internet-savvy a person or company is; a kind of nerd shibboleth. The whole thing feels like it would have been bold and clever in the early 1990s—an intellectual counterpart to the stupidity of Yahoo!'s embedded exclamation mark.
