djst's nest

Let's change the Mozilla Firebird icon!

Arvid has made a new application icon/logo for Mozilla Firebird:

Arvid's icon is so much better than the official one, and for several reasons:

1. The icon is not red
2. The icon is descriptive
3. It uses more than three colors

1. It's not red.

Red suggests "aggression, hostility, heat, stop, error, warning, danger, error, fire, lushness and passion". Blue, on the other hand, "symbolizes calm, peaceful, water, sky, harmony, therapeutic, trust, confidence, cleanliness and loyalty". Gives people energy. Safe color to use in design.

Choosing red as the primary color in an application icon is just not a good idea. I installed AntiVir on a friend's computer the other day because of the Blast virus and one of the first things he reacted to was the lousy application icon they use! He immediately felt that there was something alerting and wrong with it. I'm having plans on making him switch to Mozilla Firebird soon, but I'll definitely replace the current icon.

2. The icon is descriptive

Arvid's icon is actually descriptive enough to tell the user what the program is about. At the same time it's unique because of the wing resembling the letter "F" for Firebird. The current icon, however, reveals absolutely nothing of what Mozilla Firebird is. It could be anything from a firewall to CD burning software.

3. It uses more than three colors

The current icon only uses two colors, if you count the black border out: two intensively saturated shades of red. Arvid's icon uses calm colors, conforming with the Windows XP icon guidelines. It also has the drop-shadow discussed in the same article.

The bottom line is simply that we should use Arvid's icon for Mozilla Firebird instead of the current one!

Update! Arvid posted his own comments about the icon in the Firebird General forum of MozillaZine.

JavaScript fun

JavaScript is actually pretty fun! Alan and I have been working on the .js implementation of the themes listing at Mozilla Firebird Help. We've come up with a few improvements:

• The page now detects what version of Mozilla Firebird you're using and displays only the themes that actually works for that version.
• The page will soon be split up into several pages because of the huge amounts of themes currently available.
• The table of contents now truncates theme names that are longer than 20 characters, to ensure the grid layout doesn't break.

Be sure to reload the page to see the difference, as Mozilla doesn't usually check for new versions of .js files unless you force it to. Also, please note that a lot of theme preview images are still missing. This will hopefully be fixed soon.