Blackbird: The World's First African American Browser

What is it?

Blackbird is the world's first web browser designed specifically for African Americans. Unless you count Mosaic before it was stolen by the white man and turned into Netscape.

Why does it matter?

White people on the Internet were able to pretend to be black people freely before the release of Blackbird. This new development has upset the totally colorblind room full of white people and raises a number of complicated issues about racial identity in the Information age. All of these issues can be addressed by pointing out the unfair double standard. A whites-only browser would make those darn blacks furious!

Why should you care?

It's something to download ironically to feel better than other people. It might eventually become culturally relevant after a white guy takes Blackbird and redesigns it to include self-deprecating nerdiness standing in for ghettolore tropes.

I felt great pride when Lowtax asked me to review Blackbird for Something Awful. His request finally made it official: I am the blackest writer.

After I pushed Frolixo out I thought I was a shoe-in for blackest writer, but then Livestock started wearing train conductor denim overalls from Sean John and Dr. Thorpe was going around with the DipSet eagle embroidered on his eye-patch. No matter how loudly I was singing along to Ice Cube I could feel my blackness slipping away like I just got ghetto-level drained by Tupac's wraith.

Then boss-man Kyanka gave me the seal of approval. "Download that black browser," he said. "Write an article about it."

Getting Started

"Blackbird is the web browser for the African American Community. Blackbird was developed by a team of African Americans to allow you to connect to what's going on in the African American community."

Blackbird was developed by 40A, Inc. and is based on the popular Mozilla architecture which provides the bones for white browsers like Firefox. The most obvious difference is the appearance of the browser. It's black.

In addition to affirming blackness by being black, Blackbird offers a host of features targeted at helping the African American community connect.

• Black Search
• Black News Ticker
• Black Bookmarks
• Blackbird TV
• Social Bookmarking
• Email Manager
• Social Network Manager

Although I am technically not black, I was looking forward to trying out these features. I downloaded the browser to my desktop and installed it. Installation was quick and easy. There were no Lafferian prompts to ask me how many Chambers of the Wu Tang there are or who popularized peanuts.

I launched Blackbird and immediately began to enjoy my new black browser. I was feeling blacker already, but I had to try out some of the features.