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Firefox 3.5 will support IRC through Mibbit (Download Squad)

Mar 19th 2009 11:14PM notatoad: there is no way this could be considered bloat. They aren't integrating mibbit's source code into Firefox (impossible because mibbit isn't even open source), they are just providing a handler. If you go into your Firefox options/preferences, you should be able to set certain filetypes to open with certain applications. Those applications aren't bloating Firefox; they are purely external and are just referenced by the options. Much like the Google search box, it simply takes you to a page generated by a website based on your request (the search box takes your input and tells Google to search for that, then displays the page Google generates, whereas the IRC setup takes a link to a chatroom on an IRC server and takes you to a chatroom page generated by the mibbit server that corresponds to the chatroom and server the link contained). Firefox would gain far less than 1 KB in application size from the necessary code to let webpages open files or addresses in the same way desktop applications do now.