Blackbird- A new web browser for black folks
While doing my usual web surfing I came across this news item at FoxNews.com. There’s a new web browser that caters to African Americans/black folks called Blackbird.
Blackbird was founded by three black entrepreneurs.
Blackbird was developed on the simple proposition that we, as the African American community, can make the Internet experience better for ourselves and, in doing so, make it better for everyone. Primarily we believe that the Blackbird application can make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos via Blackbird.
In turn, we can provide you with up-to-date information about what’s hot in our community as well as news and user recommendations related to all things African American. So, we encourage you to download and try Blackbird now that it’s available! (Better than 9 out of 10 of the users that downloaded the alpha version the Blackbird Browser continued to use Blackbird as their main browser).
Blackbird is operated by 40A, Inc., a company founded by three African American entrepreneurs, Arnold Brown II, Frank Washington, and H. Edward Young, Jr.
According to the FoxNews article reaction from black bloggers seem to be mixed:
Reaction from black bloggers, tech writers and commenters has been, shall we say, a bit mixed.
“Wait, why do I need a special Web browser?” asked Gizmodo writer Adrian Covert. “Last time I checked, I don’t physically browse the Internet any different than anyone else.”
“The way this browser is marketed, the language, and the very idea that Black people somehow need a different piece of software to deal with the Internet all rubs me the wrong way,” wrote K.T. Bradford of Laptop magazine.
The BlackWeb 2.0 blog was more supportive.
“There is a Black culture and a Black Experience, and this naturally translates online and into any other medium since we are all a part of the human race,” regular poster “Markus” wrote. “In 2008 it is not wrong to want to identify with your culture regardless of what that culture may be or how you choose to identify with it.”
But the angriest reaction came from a commenter on Gizmodo who calls himself “Cordfucious the Ubuntu Walker.”
“I am offended at this,” he posted. “As a Black man in this country I don’t need a browser to help my kids find culturally relevant material… it’s the damn WORLD WIDE WEB… not the Black Web, or White Web or Yellow Web. … It’s s— like this that burns me up. I need to tell my wife (who is Hispanic) that the[y] need the BlackBean browser for the Hispanic community.”
BlackWeb 2.0 interviewed one of Blackbird’s founders. According to Ed Young:
Blackbird was built using Mozilla technology, which gives the browser a similar look and feel to Firefox. And by default, BlackBird imports all of your Firefox plug-ins. But what makes Blackbird different is its custom add-ons, bookmarks, relevant bookmarks, and themes designed to cater to the Black community.
I haven’t downloaded Blackbird. Right now I have IE and Firefox. I use Firefox about 90 percent of the time cause I was having too many problems with IE. I might download Blackbird just to give it a look see. But Firefox remains my number one browser.
I think it is innovate and useful and it is not racist. I do a lot of research on the internet and I do find when you are doing a search on specific key words like African American owned, Black owned and Blacks in technology not a whole lot comes up and you really have to dig for it. And for the idiots that whine about racism look at your own retarded disgusting history this is why inbreeds should not exist.