Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

Firefox Crop Circle

Wednesday, 29th November 2006 by Alex

All of a sudden there’s an absolutely enormous Firefox Logo Crop Circle carved into this field in Oregon, where previously there was nothing! Are aliens telling us their browser preferences? Or has Internet Explorer finally been eradicated from the Internet?

In fact this 67 metre wide icon was created by the Oregon State University Linux Users Group to celebrate the launch of Firefox version 2, and to the south of the logo you can see that they’ve also arranged their vehicles spell out “FX2“.

You can read more about the project at the Oregon State University site, and congratulations to Jon Hicks - who is now the designer of the world’s largest application icon!

14 Responses to 'Firefox Crop Circle'

  1. 1. Nikita says:

    I wonder what are those people south of the field waiting for? Being kidnapped by open source aliens? :)

  2. 2. Nikita says:

    Oh, I overlooked the FX. If they created this crop circle I wonder how they knew that the satellite was just flying over? Or was this one taken by plane by some Firefox fan at google? ^^

  3. 3. Mr M says:

    The formation of cars/people/a Piper Pawnee crop-duster aircraft below the logo appear to spell out “FX2″ possibly as a reference to the latest version of the popular web browser - FirefoX 2. Slightly too subtle I think, considering the impact of the giant logo.

  4. Google Sightseeing Admin
    4. Alex says:

    I never even noticed the FX2!

    The photo was actually taken by an aerial photography plane in this case, you can read more about the creation of this logo here and here.

  5. 5. Michael says:

    Why is there a completely square shaded box around the logo?

    This looks like the source image in the map has been edited in someway.

    Anybody else think the same?

    Could there be another reason for the different hue and brightness of the shaded box?

    Did Google take a new satellite photograph of this map square only?!

    Is Firefox hacking Google maps?

  6. 6. HobbesPDX says:

    Check out:
    http://www.firefoxflicks.com/web-diaries/?cat=1&paged=2

    This will explain the beings which brought this crop circle into being…

  7. 7. Mark says:

    It seems very likely that the creators of this crop circle had the aeriel photo taken, which would explain why the photo was taken squarely on the logo. Someone at Google must have come accross the picture and decided to integrate it.

  8. 8. Keith T. says:

    If you view this in real GMaps and zoom in all the way, you will see that the copyright at the bottom changes to say simply Google, and not DigitalGlobe.

    Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

  9. 9. dave says:

    i think thats a very cheap way to make comercial. i guess firefox payed google to integrate it.
    i mean look at the area, there i nothing special on it, just farms. whats so interesting to take a closer look? right, nothing, except u know what u find.

    cheers
    dave

  10. 10. Timhogs says:

    I suspect collusion - it seems that of all the surrounding area, only this one square is available at the highest resolution level.

  11. 11. rob says:

    Yeh, what happened is that basically, someone from google will have been a mate with someone from firefox team, and got given this aerial shot. and just stuck it in the db.

  12. 12. Scott Nichols says:

    I am the red dot in the “2″, which is not a “2″. We are just laying there. We all sort of plopped down in a random shape. This all happened before firefox2 came out.

    the square shape one poster noticed is the ultra high res picture turning into high res picture. The google plane did that because otherwise it would have a line at the low res pictures… they are blending…

  13. 13. Scott Nichols says:

    rob is not correct… google sent a plane to take the pictures.

  14. 14. Tim says:

    Y’know, they should tell us when they’re going to take arial photos… then people all over the photographed area would intentionally make the best sights ever.

    On the downside, though, that would open the door to a whole new kind of advertising. Imagine a giant golden arches painted across an entire county, and visible from space, on Google Maps. That would suck.

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