Remember when getting on the Internet was actually an adventure? You’d sit down at the computer with absolutely no idea what you were going to find, and three hours later you’d somehow gone from looking up a video game cheat code to watching a guy dance in his bedroom, reading about a supposedly haunted house in Ohio, and arguing with somebody on a message board about whether Final Fantasy VII was better than Final Fantasy VI.
You probably never did find that cheat code.
But you had a pretty good time looking for it.
Well, apparently somebody over at Mozilla remembers those days too, because Firefox has launched a new advertising campaign built around a rather interesting question: What the hell happened to the Internet?
And considering the slogan sitting at the top of this very website is MAKING INTERNET FUN AGAIN, you can probably imagine how quickly that caught my attention.
The Internet’s Old Friends Are Back
Mozilla launched its Come Back to Firefox campaign on October 25, bringing together a collection of familiar faces from the days when becoming an Internet celebrity didn’t necessarily require a production crew, a sponsorship deal, and a thumbnail featuring somebody screaming with their mouth wide open. I know, that was three days ago, and the Internet has probably already forgotten about it, but dammit, I move slow.
We’re talking about Numa Numa Guy, Bad Luck Brian, Overly Attached Girlfriend, Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame, Annoying Orange, Dancing Matt, Success Kid, and several others.
Yes, the Numa Numa Guy is back.
And yes, he’s still dancing.
If you spent any considerable amount of time online during the 2000s, there’s a pretty good chance at least a few of those names bring back memories. You might even remember exactly where you were when you first saw some of their videos.
Or perhaps you’re trying desperately to forget that you spent an entire afternoon watching Annoying Orange.
I won’t judge. We’ve all made questionable entertainment decisions. I’ve voluntarily watched some movies that make Annoying Orange look like an award-winning documentary.
The campaign brings these old Internet personalities together to poke fun at the modern web, particularly the way companies track everything we do and insist on stuffing artificial intelligence into practically every corner of our digital lives.
Wait just a damn minute there, Mozilla. There’s nothing inherently wrong with AI, and I mean artificial intelligence, not Asian Inflation, although I suppose that’s perfectly reasonable too. AI can actually help make the Internet fun again. After all, the Halls of Titanquisitor are practically powered by the stuff, and I happen to think we’re having a pretty good time around here.
The problem isn’t artificial intelligence itself. It’s what people choose to do with it. You can use it to churn out thousands of soulless articles nobody particularly wants to read, or you can use it to help build an entire imaginary medieval publishing empire populated by argumentative Greek goddesses, a wrestling-obsessed scorpion, and a warrior who spends an unreasonable amount of time playing video games.
Personally, I prefer the second option.
And if anybody at Mozilla would like to argue the point, they’re welcome to take it up with Thalia. Although I’d strongly recommend not mentioning Asian Inflation in her presence. She’s already got enough ideas.
Overly Attached Girlfriend complaining about companies following people around the Internet is a particularly amusing bit of casting.
I mean, when she’s concerned about somebody being too clingy, perhaps we’ve got a problem.
Mozilla’s message is that Firefox still offers an alternative, with privacy protections and more control over which features users actually want. Naturally, the company would also very much appreciate it if everybody started using Firefox again.
It is an advertisement, after all. But underneath the marketing pitch is something I think deserves a little attention. And it’s not just that Overly Attached Girlfriend is still Overly Hot. Just look at her big beautiful eyes there.
When Websites Actually Had Personalities
I miss the old Internet.
Not necessarily the dial-up connections, mind you. I don’t really miss waiting fifteen minutes for a picture to load while somebody in the other room picks up the telephone and disconnects everything.
And I certainly don’t miss downloading what I thought was a wrestling entrance theme from LimeWire, only to discover I’d apparently invited seventeen computer viruses into the house.
But I miss what the Internet felt like.
You could find websites dedicated to practically anything imaginable, and a surprising number of them were run by ordinary people who simply loved whatever they were writing about.
Somebody would build an entire website dedicated to an obscure Super Nintendo game. Another person would spend years cataloging old wrestling results. You’d stumble across a movie review site with a black background, bright green text, and an animated GIF of a skeleton playing guitar.
Was it professional?
Probably not.
Was it entertaining?
Hell yes.
People had guestbooks, forums, personal blogs, ridiculous animated graphics, and little counters proudly announcing that you were visitor number 4,782.
Sometimes you’d find a website that hadn’t been updated since 1998, but it was still sitting there, waiting to tell you everything you never knew you wanted to know about Mortal Kombat II.
And the wonderful thing was that you didn’t need somebody else’s algorithm to give you permission to discover it.
You just wandered around.
One link led to another. You bookmarked the places you liked. You came back because you enjoyed the person running the site, not because an app decided you needed to see their latest post.
It wasn’t all wonderful, of course. The old Internet had plenty of garbage, scams, terrible opinions, and people who probably shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a keyboard.
But at least the garbage occasionally had some personality.
And as a young teenager exploring the World Wild Web, I distinctly remember some major wrestling websites that shamelessly featured entire galleries of topless women and outright pornography. I’m just trying to find out more about the WWF buying WCW. It’s not my fault there are titties all over the screen and a thousand pop-ups trying to sell me something.
And God help you if somebody walked into the room at the wrong moment. How the hell was I supposed to explain that I was researching the future of professional wrestling while half the screen looked like the back room of an adult video store? Speaking of which, Video Store Nightmares (An Adult Coloring Book) is available now for your purchasing pleasure.
Somewhere Along the Way, Everything Started Looking the Same
These days, an awful lot of the Internet feels like it’s been squeezed into the same handful of websites and apps.
Everybody is competing for attention. Everybody wants engagement. Every headline needs to generate clicks, every video needs to retain viewers, and every website is apparently supposed to be optimized for seventeen different things before anybody is allowed to have a little fun.
Want to write about a twenty-year-old video game?
Well, first you’d better determine whether the subject has sufficient search volume, analyze your competitors, identify the appropriate keywords, and figure out whether your article has a realistic chance of ranking on Google.
Or, and I realize this is a radical proposition, you could just write about the damn game because you like it.
What a concept.
I’m not suggesting websites shouldn’t care about attracting visitors or making money. I’d be delighted if Titanquisitor eventually earned enough to become my full-time job. I have bills to pay just like everybody else, and unfortunately the electric company doesn’t accept nostalgic appreciation for Super Mario Bros. 3 as payment.
I’ve asked. Well, no, I haven’t actually asked, I’m not stupid. But I’m reasonably confident about the answer.
My point is that somewhere along the way, the business of being online started overshadowing the enjoyment of being online.
You can feel it when you visit a website that seems more interested in getting you to click another article than in making the one you’re reading worth your time.
You can feel it when a perfectly ordinary question somehow requires scrolling through fourteen paragraphs of filler before you get an answer. Pay no attention to how long my retro reviews can get.
And you can definitely feel it when you open an app to look at something your friend posted and end up watching thirty-seven videos from people you’ve never met.
Then you look at the clock and wonder where the last hour went.
Can Firefox Bring the Old Internet Back?
Well, no.
At least not by itself.
Changing your web browser isn’t going to magically resurrect every old forum, bring back your favorite abandoned fansite, or convince everybody to stop treating the Internet like an endless competition for attention.
Although if Firefox could somehow restore all the old GeoCities websites exactly as they were, complete with their spinning skulls and questionable background music, I’d certainly be interested. And I wouldn’t be opposed to a few more sleazy galleries on otherwise respectable establishments. Not here, of course, we have standards!
Mozilla deserves some credit for recognizing what made that earlier Internet special, though. Its campaign isn’t simply saying that old memes were funny. It’s reminding people that the web once felt like a place where ordinary individuals could create something interesting and share it with the world.
And here’s the thing.
We can still do that.
Nobody has passed a law requiring every website to look like a corporate brochure. Nobody is stopping somebody from creating a fan page dedicated to Golden Axe, writing a ridiculous movie review, or starting a message board where people argue about professional wrestling.
You don’t need a million followers.
You don’t need a production studio.
You don’t even need to be particularly good at designing websites. Hell, take a look at our magnificent Halls, created entirely from scratch with AI, completely free, in a matter of three hours and 27 revisions to nail the design.
Believe me, some of those old pages looked like somebody had dumped an entire box of crayons into a computer monitor, and we loved them anyway.
You just need something you enjoy and a willingness to share it.
Making Internet Fun Again
That’s a big part of why Titanquisitor exists.
I want a place where we can talk about old video games, new video games, movies, music, wrestling, and whatever else happens to catch our attention.
One day we’re discussing an obscure Super Nintendo fishing game. The next we’re watching a ridiculous horror movie, revisiting a wrestling match from thirty years ago, or debating whether a particular album deserves another listen.
Sometimes the articles are serious. Sometimes they’re informative. And sometimes I spend entirely too much time making jokes about a fishing game because the thought of somebody pulling a pair of underwear out of a lake amuses me.
I’m not entirely sure what that says about me, but here we are.
I don’t want Titanquisitor to feel like a collection of articles manufactured to satisfy a search engine. I want it to feel like somebody’s favorite little corner of the Internet, the kind of place you might stumble across while looking for something else and decide to stick around for a while.
And if you happen to enjoy the same strange assortment of entertainment that we do, all the better.
So I genuinely appreciate what Mozilla is doing with this campaign. Seeing those old Internet personalities together again is entertaining, and the message behind their reunion is worth hearing.
Will it convince me to change browsers?
Absolutely not! I’m perfectly happy with Edge. You see that beautiful Halls Classified comic strip down below (created with imagination and AI)? Microsoft Rewards. I get extra points for using Edge, so I’ll stick with it. Sorry, Mozilla, you had your day 20 years ago. Unless you start offering some rewards, then we’ll discuss it!
But it certainly reminds me why I fell in love with the Internet in the first place.
The Internet doesn’t need to become exactly what it was twenty years ago. We’ve gained plenty of wonderful things since then, and I’m not particularly interested in going back to waiting for a JPEG to finish loading.
What I’d like to see return is the sense that the Internet belongs to the people using it, and that making something enjoyable is a perfectly good reason to make it. I’d also love to see people venture outside their social bubbles and safe spaces, explore actual websites again, and stop spending all their time on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And God forbid, Bluesky.
Firefox wants to bring back the Internet we loved.
Around here, we’re already working on it.
Making Internet Fun Again.
And if anybody knows where I can find that old animated skeleton playing guitar, send him my way. I think we’ve got an opening in the music department.
