Firefox. You must have heard of it by now, you know, that really ‘cool’ browser that sees itself taking over the world of internet surfing in 5 to 10 years. Yes, that’s the one.
If I were to ask ‘What’s their logo?,’ of an average Firefox user, the answer you’d expect (and can safely bet your money on) would be “A red fox around a globe” except, of course, for the fact that isn’t. Well, yes, that is a globe, but that logo has never actually featured a red fox!
What you see above isn’t a fox. Sure, it may look like one, but it isn’t. As a matter of fact, it has nothing to do with a red fox or a brown fox, and if you had said ‘red raccoon’ or ‘tiny and very-colorful panda’ you would have been a lot closer to the truth.
Firefox’s official name-and-logo sake is the ‘Red Panda.’ It looks like a raccoon, eats like a panda, it’s related to neither, and is a dark shade of reddish-brown. The Americans call it ‘Red Panda,’ the Germans ‘Katzenbär,’ and the Chinese ‘hǔo hú (火狐),’ which translates directly to ‘Fire Fox.’
This is the creature depicted in Firefox’s logo. When Firefox 0.8 came along (bare months after the name change from Firebird to Firefox), Firefox had a new logo. Jon Hicks is the renowned author of the Firefox logo today, and his logo was designed to look like the literal name of the software (a fox on fire), yet not deviate too much from the original Red Panda namesake.
Arguably, the animal on the globe is a fox, and as such the answer to the question posed earlier up really is a fox, but at this point, it’s just semantics. In reality, the creature on the globe is a depiction of a reddish-colored, long-bodied, tail-endowed, species; and just like the browser, it’s on fire.
So, the logo has never featured a fox, but the logo is of a fox on fire. You are contradicting yourself.
No matter what the logo really is! Firefox is a really great browser!
No Joe, the logo could be a fox on fire, but it isn’t. You can say it is, but from the very beginning, Mozilla intended it to be a Red Panda, but Jon Hicks made the Red Panda look like a fox.
Wow, I never knew that. I’m going to go and make my dad look small now. 😛
Have you ever seen a real fox? The logo looks a lot more like a Fox than the Red Panda, even if the literal translation of the chinese name is \”Fire Fox\”. In case no one noticed this on the logo, the face is mostly orange, not white; the leg is red/orange, not black/dark red; the tail is a solid color, not stripped. Although I have never seen a Red Panda personally, the logo looks a lot more like a red fox (which I have seen) than a panda, despite what the designer or anyone else may have intended it to look like.
As the article mentions, the logo is drawn as a Red Panda in the the likeness of a fox.
You do not see the front of the face, but if you look closely, the white is there. It can also be said that the orange and yellow bands on the tail in the image represend the strips of the Red Panda’s tail.. All this is kinda pointless though since it comes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Ask the original Mozilla devs 🙂
I want a Red Panda, they’re so cute 😀
Would you actually like one rambling around your house and destroying all your possessions? 😛
good point.
I guess Firefox will have to be enough 😉
Did you see this one?
It doesn’t look like it’d wreck your house down now, does it? 😉
Hehehe, maybe not, however, what about food? The couch and it’s claws? Hair? I could go on for hours, but I don’t want to add another megabyte of comments to Neosmart’s MySQL database. 😛
lol.. let me worry about that.
But I have a cat and it’s not that big of a disaster!
Are you sure about that? One of my friends has a cat and they’ve been through three couches since.
I have two cats, two birds, 4 turtles, (used to have 3 rabbits too), and a lot of fish. I’m sure 😀
Wow, not bad.
I have a fish named “Whiteboy” (I know….), and I’m hopefully getting a rabbit for my birthday (20th August). 😀
Look at the current Firefox logo carefully… The “flames” are actually a cleverly disguised red fox curled around the globe! Head and cocked ears on the left, bushy yellow tail on the right… Its just a matter of perspective. 😉
No matter what the logo really is! Firefox is a really great browser!
It is not a red panda, it is a fox.
I don’t believe in all of these lies and urban legends of calling Mozilla Firefox’s animal a red panda instead of a fox. To tell the truth, Mozilla Firefox’s true animal is the red fox on fire. Even the designer of the Firefox logo said that it was based on a fox: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-firefox
Also, the Firefox OS design for Mozilla’s animal, which is obviously a fox and not a red panda.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/
Not to mention Firefox mascots all over the world, such as Kit, G-Fox, and Foxkeh; they’re all foxes.
The browser has nothing to do with red pandas with the exception of sponsoring zoo animals and raising awareness for them, but that doesn’t mean that Mozilla’s Firefox is not a fox, because it certainly is. Another name for another animal doesn’t mean that it’s the official animal for the one it was sponsored by. Mozilla may have said in their FAQ that ‘firefox’ is another word for the red panda, but that doesn’t mean that their Firefox is a red panda. The truth is told, the real Mozilla Firefox animal is the fox.
Pretend and lie all you want with your urban legends, but you can never deny the truth.
vox, you sound stupid. i read that article 2 times and he clearly says it is a cute red panda. so maybe you should pay attention to what your reading. (i know your post was along time ago)
I told my classmates about this, fire fox is not a fox. But they just laugh at me and say I am being ridiculous, what should I do? Cause believe this is a red panda
sorry, but as a chinese i have to point out that we don’y call red pandas fire fox, we call it a small panda 🙂