lizard branding.

A new article has appeared on mozilla.org on Mozilla Branding, with a nice way to settle the whole Firebird naming fiasco. Excerpts:

4. Current Brand

Our current brand is largely associated with the previous Netscape product releases.  When talking about the “open source version of Netscape” the press usually talks about this nebulous thing: “Mozilla”  People inside of the project usually call it the “app suite” or sometimes they separate the “browser” or “mail/news,” but it is almost always referred to as a “release of Mozilla” when we reach a milestone.

From now on we should try to capitalize on the Mozilla name, as it is already well known and is widely used outside of our small technical community.  However, once we have got a logical split of the browser and mail/news into separately run projects, we should use the brand we have while allowing the two main parts (and other parts, in the future) to have their own identities, while still reinforcing the Mozilla name.

5.  Rules of the Game

Before and during the release of Mozilla 1.4, we need to make sure that we can keep our new development work (Thunderbird/Firebird) separate from SeaMonkey.  There are quite a few reasons to do this, including making sure that we can keep the right bugs in the right place (the technical reasons) and to avoid any kind of brand confusion in the marketplace or in the press (branding reason.)  This gives us our rules of the game:

1.  When referring to a SeaMonkey-based release use the phrase “Mozilla Application Suite” as the name of the app suite.

It’s not sexy, and people will probably shorten it to “App Suite” or just “Mozilla” but we want to make sure that it’s made distinct from the upcoming Browser and Mail products.

2.  When referring to specific parts of the Application Suite, use Mozilla Navigator and Mozilla Messenger.

Sometimes we need to refer to specific parts of the App Suite.  These names have been around a long time and were inherited from the old Netscape products and we should probably stick to them.  Also, they are distinct from Browser and Mail which is important in the long run.

3. When referring to Thunderbird or Firebird before or during the 1.4 release cycle, make sure to use the project name with Mozilla pre-pended as “Mozilla Thunderbird” or “Mozilla Firebird” instead of Mozilla alone or Firebird/Thunderbird alone.

After the release of 1.4 we will be doing our primary development on the Firebird and Thunderbird projects.  When we do releases of that codebase we should be using self-descriptive brand identities for the public and the press.  New rule:

4.  Use the names “Mozilla Browser” and “Mozilla Mail” to describe the Firebird and Thunderbird projects after the 1.4 release.

Also, this branding should be found throughout the projects if possible instead of referring to the Firebird and Thunderbird names directly.  Project names are transitory.  As long as we have both a mail and browser project, we should be using the Mozilla brand and reinforcing it whenever we get the chance.

I’m glad to see that “Mozilla Mail” and “Mozilla Browser” won out, even though I generally like “Phoenix” as a name. The distinction between them and “Mozilla Navigator/Messenger” is a fine one, and perhaps confusing, but since one will replace the other, it probably won’t matter anyway.