In the techie world, I can understand the idea that function comes first. If I can use it to get the job done, I smile. But the fact that Apple has proven is that if you take that thing that got the job done and coat with a beautiful UI, people smile even more. So Thom Holwerda at OSNews shouldn’t dismiss Mozilla Ubiquity getting a cool icon.
As for the logo contest, I’m not seeing any clear winners, but this is a project that doesn’t deserve to have the attention focused on something as insignificant as the logo.
It’s not really a contest- they’ve engaged an awesome icon designer to do the logo. Regardless of which wins, he sketched all the candidates and will do the final design. And it will be awesome. Voting yes. Contest no.
Why bother with a cool icon? In this post on OStatic about Mozilla, a research project found that:
- 866 users had Firefox installed on their machines, but 356 had stopped using it.
- Of those 356 users, 337 had never installed a single extension!
- Of 124 users who currently had Firefox extensions loaded, a whopping 93 listed the extensions as their primary reason for using the browser.
- Of the 124 users who had extensions installed, only 23 had 6 or more loaded.
Let me try to break that down.
59% of users decided to continue using Firefox. Great!
Of those that kept using it, 24% used extensions.
And this is key, 76% of those that kept Firefox did so because of the extensions. To spell it out, those using extensions have found that it opens up a whole new world. If you could persuade the others that kept using Firefox to just give an extension or two a try, they might love Firefox even more. And what about that 41% that stopped using Firefox? 95% of them- 95%– had never tried an extension. They had completely missed one of Firefox’s greatest strengths. Why?
Marketing.
No, seriously. Why would someone load an extension? They had never loaded an extension before. That’s not why they have a browser, right? Internet Explorer doesn’t do that? What’s an extension?
To get those 95% to stick with Firefox, they have to want to try an extension. And an insanely cool icon might get a couple more to give an extension a whirl.