I’ll try my best to keep this critical, but let it be known that I think a web browser for African-Americans is just as inane and untenable a concept to bring to market as any other web product or SaaS which tries to commodify African-Americans as a monolithic entity with the same skills, likes, dislikes, and interests.

Then again, my degree was in Math, not marketing, so what the hell do I know? Let’s run this bitch!

INSTALLATION

What threw me off first was that there are two ways to download the browser from the company’s main site, and one of them involves a ReCaptcha text verification box. Maybe this is part of some Blackbird marketing campaign, but why it’s present on the site’s front page is beyond me.

Installation is the standard fare on Windows machines (sorry, no Mac or Linux versions available at this time, which for a new browser release, is quite uncommon). While Blackbird is built on a Mozilla core, the Blackbird installation doesn’t mess with any Mozilla file locations, allowing both browsers to run simultaneously without mixups. Blackbird’s EULA includes a link to download their source code which…umm…doesn’t work.

The Import Wizard (which is in black) only allows Microsoft Internet Explorer options. Why no Firefox option, particularly when Firefox’s market share is exceeding 20%? Let’s keep going.

FIRST IMPRESSION

This looks like regular Mozilla with a dark theme and a couple of toolbars baked in for good measure. The visual difference? There are more polished dark themes on Firefox, so why not get one of those? Or at least try to commission one of those designers to create one. Luckily, I can download and install one to replace the default Blackbird theme. Two sites are brought up by default: the Blackbird home page, and what appears to be a page giving a tour of the browser (and a vertical scrolling features slideshow that won’t stop). Speaking of scrolling things, there’s also the news ticker which scrolls links to Black news articles compiled from different sources. Below this, there is a toolbar of distorted buttons for e-mail, social networks, a Digg-like Share/Most Shared buton, a Video button, and a Give Back button.

FEATURES

If you’ve used Firefox, you’ve used Blackbird. The under-the-hood options available in the File menu are standard FF fare, so no innovations there. The Bookmarks section does include different categories and links which may be of interest to African-Americans who have no idea how to use a search engine. Services gives links to the aforementioned e-mail, social networks, sharing, video and give back buttons, as well as an option to turn the news ticker off. And yes, the respective toolbars can be disabled by just right-clicking on any toolbar and unchecking “News Ticker” and “Services Toolbar”. The “Highly Recommended” links in the bookmarks toolbar has links to AOL Black Voices and BlackPlanet, while the Latest Headlines live bookmark folder echoes the same content as the news ticker. In a medium where our services are offered à la carte, who still wants (or needs) this much site tie-in and pre-supposed choices? In this case, the choices are Lifestyle, People and Networks, News and Politics, Sports and Entertainment, Business and Professional, Community Organizations, and Black Colleges and Universities.

The custom search bar has plugins to search on Google, AOL, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Rushmore Drive, and something simply called “Black Search”. This default search pulls up the Blackbird Black Search page which is a custom Blackbird-branded Google search page. The page is conspicuously named search5.html. Remove the 5 or change the numbers to 2, 3 or 4 to see older versions of this page. Blackbird folks? Rename the search page, ‘k?

Again, not much innovation.

The e-mail feature allows you to add Yahoo, Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail accounts. Only one of each though, and no POP3 or IMAP additions. Of course, since this is the Mozilla core, you can easily find an add-on to give you that functionality.

The social networks feature uses the MySpace and Facebook APIs to allow you to use these services through the browser in a fashion similar to Flock. What’s odd is that the Social Networks button in the Services toolbar only shows Facebook and MySpace options, but the drop down navigation from the Services link in the menu bar shows Facebook, MySpace, and Ning.

The real kicker of the Blackbird browser is that’s it’s mainly a portal for the Blackbird Network services. The Share/Most Shared buttons have content populated by Blackbird members. Of course, you have to sign up for this service to use these sharing services, which can be done via the browser.

The sharing feature populates to a site called Blackbird Grapevine, and the dialog box resembles Delicious, with fields for tags, a summary, and a description. I couldn’t tell if the Blackbird Grapevine is another Blackbird Network service (an African-American Delicious, I’m guessing). The Most Shared button shows a bunch of drop down menus which load in the sidebar (which has advertising that can’t be blocked). The Video button loads video services from NSNews TV, UptownlifeTV, DigitalSoulTV and Comedy Banks. The video loads in the sidebar but has ten empty non-clickable “channels”, and it doesn’t look like you can add video channels to the browser, forcing you to use just these four channels to surf video in the event you’ve never heard of YouTube, Vimeo, or a host of other online video services.

The Give Back function is the charitable arm of Blackbird Network services which is powered by good2gether . While this is a great thing to put local charities in the faces of those using the browser (I’m assuming the location is automatically deduced using Mozilla’s geocoding service), I feel like this is lumped in with the sidebar advertisements and pre-ordained bookmarks as just more forced content down the user’s throat.

And as far as updates are concerned, the in-browser update tool is broken, so you’ll have to visit the website every time you need to update the browser. I’m sure they’ll fix this soon.

DESIGN

It’s bad. I could spend time going into the eccentricities of how this particular dark design obfuscates the browsing experience or the bad UI elements (some buttons give different wording and text position in their up/down states) or how some windows aren’t able to be resized. I could wonder why the default theme is black (is it because the people who created Blackbird are Black? Is it because its demographic users are Black?), but nearly any Firefox theme can remedy this. Besides, the downsides of using a dark theme as a default is that lighter colored themes don’t override all the darkness of Blackbird. Plus, installing other add-ons may just look worse in this browser than they would for Firefox. Like Web Developer, an extension I use frequently:

Yeah…I can’t use that at all, sorry. After this paragraph, I deleted and deactivated all these Blackbird “services”, installed a new theme, and voila, it was like using a fresh Firefox installation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Blackbird, in its current version, suffers from IBIBSI Syndrome. IBIBSI is short for “It’s Black, I’m Black: Support It!”, and many things created by Black people for Black people tend to have this. I’m more interested in how a product or SaaS will work for me as an end user, not necessarily as a Black person. Especially not for a web browser. If Black people are having difficulty with finding more sites that speak to them as a Black person, then learn to use a search engine. Creating a browser with the intent of pushing content to one race of people is just a bad idea. More than that, it shows others that there are little to no nuances, interactions, or experiences with that race of people, and if one company is pushing a bunch of links and services to that race, then what would stop another one? It’s the same kind of mental rhetoric that TV network executives have when they produce a Black character on Friends or anything by Tyler Perry or DL Hughley Breaks the News. If it’s Black, and there are Black people that watch our network/use the Internet, they’ll support it, right?

No.

Maybe if this came out ten years or so ago at the height of special Black-themed search sites like EverythingBlack or BlackRefer, then things would be different. But the landscape of the ‘net is so varied and multifaceted that the introduction of a Black browser as a content-specific tool is something that the user should be able to control, not the browser’s developers.

Blackbird is on Twitter and has a Uservoice account for customer feedback, so if you have gripes with the browser, take it up with them there. In the grand scheme of things, a flawed browser release isn’t anything the tech community usually gets up in arms about; however, when you attach a racial element to it, that’s when things can get tricky. Hopefully, Blackbird can rise above that.