Mibbit

» see mibbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the first time i saw mibbit was on a freenode channel landing page sometime around 2008 or 2009. the 'chat now in your browser' button on the bottom of the page was the mibbit embed. by then i had been using mirc on windows since around '03, the browser approach felt like a step backwards for me. either way, i already had ssl plus scripts plus a dcc setup in mirc and a regular set of channels i sat in. for the people who showed up at a freenode channel once to ask a python or apache question and never came back, mibbit was the right tool.

jimmy moore was a uk developer who had been writing irc client tools for several years before mibbit launched in november 2007. the original pitch was simple: a web page you loaded with a server and channel name in the url, then a chat box that connected through mibbit's gateway proxy to whichever irc network you had chosen. the gateway approach meant you did not need to install a client and you did not need irc-protocol-aware network rules to chat from a corporate or school environment that blocked port 6667.

i actually was not paying attention to the browser-irc space much, but anyway. the big moment for mibbit was the july '09 release of firefox 3.5, which shipped with mibbit set as the default handler for the irc:// protocol scheme. that meant a regular firefox install opened mibbit in a new tab when you clicked an irc link anywhere on the web, and freenode and libera and the major networks had already been linking to their channels with irc:// urls for years. for whatever reason, mozilla switched to a chooser model in later firefox versions but the default-handler era gave mibbit a couple of years as the most-used web irc tool by a clear margin.

the social-web pivot expanded mibbit beyond irc into yahoo messenger and twitter gateways, both of which broke when the parent platforms restricted third-party access (yahoo around '12 in the various ym client wars, twitter in the post-musk api crackdown of 2023). by then mibbit was basically an irc-only tool with a free tier and a paid plan that was mostly empty. freenode itself splintered into libera chat in '21 and the irc world generally kept shrinking. on august 30 '24 the free tier shut down, the shutdown notice pointed users to kiwi irc.

~ the case file ~

~ the firefox moment ~

mozilla's 2009 default-handler decision was the closest mibbit ever came to a mainstream user base. firefox 3.5 had a several-hundred-million-user install base, every irc:// link clicked from a forum or a wiki opened a mibbit session in a new tab. honestly the actual usage numbers were never large in absolute terms (irc was already a fading protocol by then) but mibbit captured a meaningful share of whatever was left. for what it's worth, mozilla quietly dropped the default-handler relationship in firefox 4 and the irc:// urls then defaulted to whichever client the user already had registered locally.

~ what got buried with it ~

when the august '24 shutdown landed there was no big farewell post, the front page replaced with a short notice and a link to kiwi irc. the chat archives mibbit had run as a paid feature were not migrated anywhere, the user accounts got nothing in the way of export tools. for what it's worth, mibbit's user base had been thin for years and the shutdown registered mostly in the irc community itself, a single thread on hacker news that ran for a day.

~ what it became ~

kiwi irc has effectively inherited mibbit's role as the canonical browser irc client, the libera chat web client is built on kiwi. the broader irc-as-anybody's-protocol moment ended years ago. anyway, the protocol is still alive on libera (where the open source projects mostly moved after freenode collapsed) and on a handful of regional networks. honestly the browser-client part of the irc story is now the kiwi part, mibbit's slow decline through the 2010s is mostly forgotten by anyone who was not running their own channel in '09.

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