Jesus Explorer (ConceptTopic, 11)

From Compile Worlds

Jesus Explorer was Scientology's first attempt at destroying Jesusism. It's blinking text feature was well known for starting a chain reaction of n00b-like practices among users of the internet, much like guest books, web rings and visiting 4chan.

The browser was a huge success, but it had not fulfilled it's purpose.

about:jesus

Jesus Explorer 2.0 had a strange bug where randomly the contents of a page, address bar and title bar text (but interestingly, not the task bar text) would be replaced with about:jesus for fifteen seconds. This bug was annoying and pissed people off.

What many did not know is that this was a failed attempt to destroy Jesus using his minions. Scientology later learned that blinking text does not and can never in any case cause hypnosis as they previously assumed.

My Favorites

Jesus Explorer introduced a feature the internet had never seen before; other than blinking text, it had a page database known as My Favorites. This database was designed to contain a list of websites frequently visited by the user. However, researchers later learned that this feature was bugged; half of all pages redirected you to the Church of Scientology homepage.

PrivacyGuard

Another impressive idea introduced in Jesus Explorer, not implemented again for quite some time, is PrivacyGuard. PrivacyGuard blocks pages that are suspected of forgery or malicious content.

While the idea was good, it didn't work very well. It made most pages on the internet redirect to an error page. The error page often linked you to the Church of Scientology website. It's also notable for blocking all porn, an action which caused many users to destroy their computers.