[Fwd: Re: Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement]

Chris Blizzard christopher.blizzard at gmail.com
Wed Jun 16 19:42:23 UTC 2004


> Bryan and I have discussed this and we're not doing it. From an end
> desktop-user (not one of the active community folks, but Abby) the name
> of the item *is* what we put in the menu. When you or I see "Web
> Browser" in the menus we think "that item is epiphany". But to Abby,
> that item is "Web Browser": it has no other name. A good example is the
> calculator, because "Calculator" is the name of the program to us.
> Wouldn't it be weird if, upon installing "Pro+ Calculator" calculator,
> suddenly the default calculator was called "SimpleMath Calculator" (or
> whatever)? Its like some magic new name appeared for it!
> 
> "Web Browser" is the *real name* of the item to Abby, not Epiphany.
> Calling it "Epiphany Web Browser" all of the sudden because I installed
> "Firefox Web Browser" is going to be weird, and it doesn't really help
> anything. "Epiphany" is just as foreign to Abby as "SimpleMath
> Calculator" is to us.

It depends on how strong the branding is.  Firefox, for example, is
starting to develop a brand of its own.  It would be worth it in that
case to include "Mozilla Firefox" as the launcher instead of "Web
Browser."  There's also the issue of whether or not you want to
consider it part of the overall brand or operating system or whether
or not you're co-branding.

A great example of this was many years ago when the browser wars were
in full swing.  I remember having conversations with people about how
they were "finding things on Netscape" even though they didn't even
have Netscape installed anwhere on their computers.  They were using
IE, but that's how strong the brand was.

--Chris





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