Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!

The Day the Earth Stood Still premiered last week, so it seems like a good time to give a look to the robotic aspect of Firefox.

For starters, in Firefox 3, enter about:robots in the location bar and press Enter. Here’s what you’ll see:

The page contents are some other famous robot related quotes:

• The page title, “Gort! Glaatu barada nikto!”, is a  quote from The day the earth stood still.
• “Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”, is the first law of robotics, according to Isaac Asimov, the late science fiction author.
• “Robots have seen things you people wouldn’t believe”, is an adapted quote of Roy Batty, in Blade Runner.
• “Robots are your plastic pals it’s fun to be with”, from  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• “Robots have shiny metal posteriors that shouldn’t be bitten.”, a quote from Bender (Futurama)

There’s also a button and a warning which is left to you to find out about.

Firefox 3 development presented a brief epic story involving the robot and Gran Paradiso, an imaginary city named after Firefox 3 code name. The story unfolded in Beta 2, 3, 4 and 5s first run pages.

Finally, Mozilla has released several posters featuring the robot: The original robot poster for Firefox 3.0 release, available at the Mozilla Store. Then came the Mozilla Summit poster, and the I Survived the Summit sticker followup. More recently, the robot went to Barcelona for MozCamp 2008 and another poster.

Firefox 3.1 development also features a giant robot so it seems we’ll have plenty of robots for the foreseeing future.