When I am asked “Which browser are you using?” I have to go through all kinds of finger calisthenics to find out. Why is it no longer displayed on the browser screen?
Can you give an example site, or a site, which actually behaves like that?
Technically browsers send and have always sent the user agent, which can be used to determinate what browser a user is using.
I am not going to pretend to understand your question but when I use Internet Explorer, I see the e in the top sections in the browser window. Oprah has the red circle there. When I use Firefox and Chrome, I see no logo. Why is that?
There are two different “identify” things here.
The user-agent HTTP header, “which can be used to determine which browser is making the request” (not with any degree of certainty, the user-agent header can be omitted or spoofed)
The browser “brand icon” - the mini-logo thing on your desktop that you click to open the app.
I do not know why some browsers would not show this at least somewhere on their chrome. Maybe to conserve space, have less visual noise? Maybe they don’t take into consideration that a user may use other than only that particular browser and not remember what browser they are using?
In Firefox you don’t have the browser logo in the UI itself, but you have it in the Windows menu (the toolbar down there with icons for all application you have currently open).
Actually that’s how usually all browsers behave. At least all applications have their icon in the taskbar or a similar thing depending on what operation system you use.
And the intelligence behind this might be what?
It would seem that product/brand reinforcement would be important here unless maybe it is embarrassing for the designers to acknowledge their work.
It is not “how usually all browsers behave” either as most do show their logo in the upper left corner. The fact that it is in the task bar is of little consolation since it is there with all other logos whether they are active or not.
I guess there is not going to be any explanation as to why this was changed. It might be in the same philosophy as to why things went anemic a while ago when the slider in the scroll bar became almost impossible to see and when text boxes disappeared to make us click around to find them.
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I don’t remember Firefox logo in the UI since v29 (Australis). If you think that’s wrong, Mozillians part of the forum is not the right place for discussion, rather you should involve someone from the UX or Firefox team.
IIRC @ehsan was involved in Photon, so he may know if this has been discussed, or who can explain the pros/cons and why it has been decided the drop the logo.
The logo is still there. It’s in the title bar.
If you go to customize, in the lower left corner there is a checkbox for title bar. Check that and the Firefox logo will appear at the left of the title bar.
Although I imagine this is somewhat “hidden” in that not all users will think to go into customize and try different things, this is consistent with my “save real estate” guess as to the “why”.
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Let me recrap that I might understand…
Someone had the foresight to create an option to “save” 1/4" at the top of the browser. When it is deactivated, the logo is hidden. In what becomes the top bar, I see a blank square at the left. No one had the insight to place the logo there?
The showing of the title bar allots predictable space that I can mouse-grab the window to move as opposed to guessing around trying to avoid activating some of the many, and mostly useless/duplicated, icons and tabs when it is not visible.
How clever is all that?
What’s more is that the title bar is hidden by default.
Interesting.
I see that I have to “reply” in order to submit.
The beat goes on…
you are right… I found this thread because I was wondering the exact same thing.
Why did someone decide to hid this icon is beyond my ability to understand. It’s as if people were trying hard to remove something just because they didn’t know any intelligent change to make, or perhaps because the really smart ones were too difficult to implement.
Anyway, the simplest solution I found was to add a theme with the Firefox logo, so it appears in the background of the top bar.
I cannot imagine that a company wants to distribute its product without promoting its logo. Who knows, maybe there is a reason to hide the owner ship.
It is a good idea about the theme. I did not think about that.