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by abledon 2988 days ago
I'm just going to say it: Their mascot was an annoying hamster.

This was their downfall.

Angular, sexy geometric design. React, sexy nuclear design. Vue, Sexy V geometric design. Ember, a big goofy rodent looking at you lol. "But abledon, what about GOlang? they have a rodent too?" Yes but golang resides in backend land where designers and frontend visual brains are lacking, only performance matters, doesnt matter if your framework's logo is a steaming pile of poo, if its fast and easy to write concurrent code in, it will win the backend holy wars.

4 comments

I think it's more about corporate sponsorship and branding.

Angular is seen as "The Google Solution" (disregarding that Google doesn't actually use it as much as people think). React is seen as "The Facebook Solution". Ember is more decentralized, and lacking a strong primary champion/sponsor. Something that developers SAY we like in open source projects, but which frankly doesn't really match our actions so much.

I chuckled a bit at the parent comment, but I won't say that logos don't matter to front-end developers (half of the HN discussion threads about a link seem to be about its font and CSS choices rather than its substantive content). But that's only a slice of what I think is the overall reason. Ember just doesn't have strong corporate brand muscle behind it.

Sure that has some value, but Angular and React brought in new ideas for their time.

I think the react 'view as a function of state' makes a ton of things easier to reason about, and will probably last for a while.

I love Ember and I do think it's the best framework out there. That said, I agree that this is a large part of the lack of market penetration
I hate that this is the defining thing people look for in their front end libraries.

But it is.

A lot of how "clean" or "modern" people think a given library is, is driven almost entirely by it's marketing homepage and only loosely tied to the actual experience of using it.

This is probably the same reason GitLab transitioned from a goofy looking mspaint mongoose to a slick angular logo
People told us the logo was scary, that was a good motivator.

When we changed, I wrote about it: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/05/18/a-new-gitlab-logo/