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community weblog
The Numa-Numinous allure of the old internet
Firefox assembles a cast of hypervirulent alumni for their "Come back to Firefox" campaign.
Nostalgia feels good in a place like this.
On first viewing, I instinctively tried to tamp down my feels for the nostalgic triggers, but when I rationalized that 1. I still use firefox, and 2. they're not trying to sell me anything else, I surrendered and thought metafilter might also like to look back in slightly smug, possibly fond remembrance.
posted by Cold Lurkey on Oct 25, 2026 at 4:08 PM
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Aww this is great. I also didn't stop using Firefox except for a few years when chrome had extensions and firefox's greasemoneky for some reason was discontinued. Now I've got Firefox on my android phone too. I've also enjoyed duckduckgo's Ai search tool which works more like "a good search engine" instead of a suspicious salesperson.
posted by rebent at 4:19 PM
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That's a pretty clever campaign.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:42 PM
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uBlock Origin and NoScript on Firefox make the web bearable.
posted by aleph at 5:11 PM
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That was a fun ad. Needed an "All Your Base" reference.
posted by briank at 6:14 PM
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a few years when chrome had extensions and firefox's greasemoneky for some reason was discontinued
Probably a combination of Aaron Boodman getting hired by Google to work on the Chrome extensions system plus (per conversations with Aaron) Greasemonkey being horrifically insecure. As in: sites were actively exploiting popular user scripts to, e.g., steal passwords, and it was somewhere between "very hard" and "impossible" for a user script to keep secrets from malicious sites.
posted by reventlov at 6:23 PM
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This is not a form of nostalgia I ever expected anyone to pander to. I feel weird.
posted by egypturnash at 7:04 PM
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Did Firefox stop including AI garbage? I installed Waterfox to get away from that:
posted by SansPoint at 7:07 PM
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I installed Waterfox but never use it since I don't knowingly encounter any 'AI garbage' with Firefox.
posted by Rash at 7:28 PM
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Firefox has an AI kill switch that disables all of those features, and it seems to work. It's under "AI controls" in the sidebar of the Settings page.
posted by JHarris at 8:51 PM
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Pepsi Blue? Noooope, Chuck Testa.
posted by xedrik at 10:21 PM
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I only briefly stopped using Firefox back when Chrome was new and showed how much better process-per-tab was than thread-per-tab. Once Firefox made the same leap, I was back because even back then I knew Google couldn't be trusted.
posted by Ickster at 11:20 PM
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ok this is darling
I IMMEDIATELY recognized the Numa Numa guy and gasped with delight
posted by The Adventure Begins at 12:34 AM
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When I learned many years ago that you could customize the Firefox skin by editing things in the browser directory I spent the better part of an afternoon creating a hyperspecific browser theme based on an anime character. I enjoyed this so much that it prompted me to see what else I could customize, which eventually took me to Linux. It was that seed of being able to open things up and tinker with them, planted by Firefox, that changed the way I viewed tech in general.
Also Success Kid was a delightful addition
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:13 AM
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I installed Waterfox but never use it since I don't knowingly encounter any 'AI garbage' with Firefox.
I don't see it on mine since I disable it but on family members' ff browsers I've seen things like "search with AI" right on the right-button context menu. On my (slightly older version) FF the "AI enhancements" listed in the settings menu are translations, image ALT text in the PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, displaying "a quick summary before opening a link", and "Keep a chatbot in view [in a sidebar] as you browse. Choose from Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Google Gemini, and Le Chat Mistral". The "block" setting turns off all of those together, so if I want to keep translations on I have to turn off the rest manually and, apparently, check every update in case they add stuff. That, the fact that it's opt-out rather than opt-in, the choice to brand these as "enhancements", the fact that it's all buried in the settings menu and that I can't trust that new updates will actually let me know about new crap that I'll want to disable, and that FF is actively going not just with accessibility features like image alt text or translation but instead with full-on "page summaries" and chatbots all make me less than optimistic about where things are going.
Oh, and it looks like future updates are going to bring "smart windows" and other crap, so yay.
Like, it's nice that all this can be disabled, but you visit your older relatives or watch the kids in your family and they all start using this stuff automatically, without any understanding or awareness of what it means, because it's just pushed on them by default. That sucks, and I don't think it's okay.
I'm also not good with how FF is lumping together features that use tiny models running locally on your computer/device, like translation or image alt text generation, with features that upload your data to some cloud-based AI service. That's a significant difference and it should be noted right in the settings, not just on separate documentation pages (not least because this could change at any point). A really responsible approach would also provide a separate kill-all switch for the local features versus the cloud ones, and make this kind of information maximally visible to users.
I still use FF, it's still miles above Chrome and Edge and so on, and having truly independent browsers that don't exist to push the interests of some ad corporation is vital, but this is not good and it's not truly being done right and it makes me a lot more hesitant to recommend FF to anyone. Making AI features available on an opt-in basis, I can understand, even if it's not what I want FF to spend its resources on. Pushing AI "enhancements" on people by default is not the same thing and it's not okay.
posted by trig at 3:43 AM
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Oh, and "what the internet used to feel like" is the exact opposite of AI Enhancement World, so that's some weirdly dissonant messaging.
posted by trig at 3:49 AM
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For reasons, I use Safari, Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Two different laptops and a phone.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:54 AM
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A weird/stupid point of pride in my Romanian studies (and I am not good yet, just sort of scratching the surface of A2, maybe) is that I fully understand and can accurately pronounce the lyrics of "Dragostea din tei" (aka the "numa numa song.")
Still looking for my chance to bust this out at karaoke.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:45 AM
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