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by hkjgkjy 3446 days ago
It's a cool concept - but surely there are a lot of regexps our there that will now trigger in vain.

Also search engines will index "moz://a" as a different thing than "mozilla". Likely, the first will be indexed as ["moz", ":", "/", "/", "a"] and the punctuation likely be thrown out, resulting in matches for "moz" and "a".

3 comments

Because search engines are using Firefox, right? This is an easter egg within the Firefox web browser. No search engine is going to notice a thing.
No, the issue is the new logo is "moz://a", so when people don't get that it's supposed to mean "mozilla" they'll type it in as "moz://a".
If they're seeing Mozilla logo somewhere, they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage regarding Mozilla or a product thereof, so all this discussion is in vain and is a parody of itself.

Also, WRT indexing, the logo is an image, not text, so the search engines will either not index it or index it like they index other images, using filename and maybe embedded metadata.

> they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage

or they've seen a sticker on a laptop. Or they've seen a t-shirt, or skimmed a magazine article. And they're now googling it, and ending up on moz.com.

It feels just like a scene from Silicon Valley.

A proper needle in a haystack situation here.
only people who don't know how to use the internet will do that
Isn't that a lot of people?
Most people, more like.
If someone actually links to moz://a, some crawlers might pick it up. But as a crawler has to parse the url and extract the scheme before it can continue, I don't see potential for confusion. Likely, "moz" wouldn't be in the list of supported schemes and the link would simply be dropped.
I think it likely that there will be regexes out there that auto-link it for people.
Why would a search engine index something that is just a local easter egg in the client software? It's not a real protocol, it will definitely redirect to an http website.
It is, however, a valid observation for the use of the string within text. It likely means every search engine needs to now add another exception to their parser to treat moz://a as a word entity.
I think y'all are overthinking this. Mozilla is not changing their name to "Moz://a". It's a logo, that's it. No one has said "Moz://a" is going to be used in text.