In the past week Mozilla (who you may know as the creators of Firefox) updated their logo for the first time since 1998. In true open-internet style, the entire process was open-sourced with the community, with the winning design chosen from a shortlist. They have a blog covering the whole process which is well worth a read.

Mozilla Creative Director Tim Murray described the logo change and search for identity in his latest post as “[…] the need for Mozilla’s purpose and brand to be better understood by more people. We want to be known as the champions for a healthy Internet.”

The UsabilityHub team couldn’t help but wonder — do people prefer the new logo over the old one? We ran a Preference Test to find out:

You may notice we gave some information about the company when asking the question. Given the nature of the logo, it only seemed fair to give some insight for those who may not know them. After all, “://” (the characters used to denote a network protocol, as in “http://”) might work for an internet company, but might not be acceptable in an unrelated industry.

The wording used to describe the new logo was “interesting” and “modern” while many also loved the “://” usage and how it clearly related to being an internet company. Reading that, it seems Tim met many of the targets he was aiming for with the redesign.

Those who preferred the old logo chose it for its “simplicity” and because it was “easy to read”. Some commented that in comparison the new logo was “weird”, “silly”, and (my personal favorite) “looks like a sad emoticon :/”.

While those who took the Preference Test were divided in the results, it’s obvious that Mozilla themselves are happy with the change. The new branding has already rolled out on their website and is being pushed forward with on a variety of digital and physical mediums.

You can view the full test results here.