Mozilla’s Firefox seems to hold a place dear in web designers’ and developers’ hearts as a bastion of open sourceness; to be honest, I’m not the most well versed in these matters so I don’t know if there are better open source browser options that have more street cred than Firefox — I’m sure there is some browser in beta called Cucumber (or whatever) that is more hardcore. But I digress. Point is that with Firefox there are no secrets, no here-is-the-latest-thing-and-you-will-like-it, it’s all about involving others. And their process to upgrade their huggable, foxy icon to coincide with the release of Firefox 3.5 was no different. Perhaps to an excruciating degree.

Specially when the changes are so minimal. Looking at the before and after images requires Sherlockian powers of deduction. [..] The changes are very subtle and, if you ask me, they are as good as the original intentions of the logo. I can’t say it’s an improvement because I don’t think there wasn’t anything in the previous one, merely two years old, that needed 14 iterations to improve. This is simply two ways of rendering a fox over a non-descript globe. You can make it more furry, you can make it less furry. You can have more land, you can have less land. You can have more shine, you can have less shine. Etcetera. Both options are perfectly acceptable.

Full article at Brand New