So I’m setting up my Firefox build environment on a new computer, which creates one of those scenarios where you quickly accumulate 250 open windows and your Windows taskbar actually starts scrolling.

Starting about three hours ago, I started hearing this noise once every couple of minutes. Now, hearing things while you try to set up a Firefox build environment isn’t unusual. It always makes you slightly delusional. But this was a new noise, something I hadn’t heard before in years of building Mozilla.

Naturally, the first thing I did was check all the networked applications that might be trying to signal my attention, but nobody had tried to reach me on AIM, MSN Messenger or IRC…

It turns out that the application so desperately requiring my attention was the Windows desktop search application. The little dog that inexplicably sits in the corner was—I swear to God—scratching himself every couple of minutes, and the noise I was hearing was paw meeting fur.

Take a moment to think about that.

If ever there was a case against “cute” and “harmless” features, this is it. And by the way, the picture above isn’t doctored. That’s actually the question the dog poses when you click on it. And if you select “Do a trick,” he will do anything from pull out a dog bowl and ask for food to—you guessed it—scratch himself again.

If the developers who programmed the dog focused instead on making sure that searching a couple hundred files on the machine next to you wasn’t ten times slower than searching 8 billion machines around the world, perhaps every search engine out there wouldn’t have to reinvent desktop search today.