Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can’t technically prove that.
It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org “dinosaur” logo is not widely available online. So, here it is.
As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article “They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo”, I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998.
↫ Jamie Zawinski
The original Mozilla dinosaur logos are works of pure art. They sure don’t make logos like this anymore.
I remember these. They were wonderful.
Zawinski is a legend. His blog is very entertaining and his passion when it comes to xscreensaver is fun to follow.
I love the dinossaur itself.
But the communist-propaganda in the art is… well, let’s just say that for a lot of countries and people this is like using SS or n@z! propaganda.
It was probably considered a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun by Mozilla to convey the open source nature of the project but I have friends who grew up in East Germany and the ESSR for whom the communist era was anything but fun. My ESSR friend said that a Soviet Union-themed bar in Tallinn that was popular with tourists was really offensive to many of the older locals — it would be interesting to know what the reaction was in former communist countries to the Mozilla branding (except for the dragon itself, which was ace).
I despise most nostalgia, but as I get old and my beard lengthens and becomes grey, I do feel a fondness for how tech and computers “used to be” until like, the mid to late 2000s.
And bitter because most of why everything sucks is 100% due to insane greed.
That website hurts my eyes!
God, this makes me miss the optimism surrounding the Internet in the 2000s.
Also makes me miss the wild aesthetic surrounding all things Linux and Free Software back then. Like, if you couldn’t make an application look like a graffitied spaceship what were you even doing?