They really did go for "moz://a."

The old Netscape browser had a dinosaur named Mozilla as its mascot and codename. When the browser was open sourced in 1998, it used the dinosaur's name and visage as its branding.

No longer. After a rebranding was announced in August, the final decision has now been revealed. The Mozilla Organization has a shiny new wordmark that spells out the word "mozilla" with a mix of letters and punctuation (written in a requisite custom font, named Zilla). A blog post describes how the new brand is meant to signal Mozilla's support for an open and accessible Web.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar treatment of the colon-slash-slash in youth-oriented TV shows to show just how with it and Internet-savvy a person or company is; a kind of nerd shibboleth. The whole thing feels like it would have been bold and clever in the early 1990s—an intellectual counterpart to the stupidity of Yahoo!'s embedded exclamation mark.

In the year 2017 it feels like a throwback, not least because Chrome, Edge, and, yes, Mozilla's own Firefox all suppress display of the colon-slash-slash when visiting non-secure URLs. The branding is built around a nerdy detail of the way protocols are written in uniform resource locators, a detail deemed so unimportant that there's no point even cluttering up the screen with it.

Firefox, fortunately, still uses a cute animal. The flame-tailed fox is fun, and as a bonus, the ever-adorable red panda with its luxuriously bushy tail is sometimes called the firefox.