Has anyone seen the new Firefox ad? Of course you do.

The ad did/does the thing as intended: Right in the feels of the Early Adopters of the Internet. I admit, I went, “aaawwww!” when I saw Gary Brolsma (The Numa Numa guy) and Matt Harding (Where the Hell is Matt). Had they added The Kid President and the whole Soul Pancake team, my life would be complete.

I admit, I downloaded Firefox to my phone after watching the ad for nostalgia sake. Firefox was my browser of choice. followed closely by Opera. I then switched to Chrome afterwards, then stuck with Chrome for years until I decided to switch to Vivaldi. I took a quick look at Firefox, and while that, yes, they mentioned that we can choose to use AI or not, I was dismayed to see the option was active by default. The option “Block AI Enhancements” under Settings > AI Controls was inactive, and I had to activate it to, you know, not using AI. Yes, it was just a mere tap (or two) on my screen, but this should be the norm, no, a.k.a. inactive by default? Always assume your user doesn’t want to use AI until they explicitly agreed that “yes, I want to use this thief that keeps stealing other people’s works tool.” A bit of intermezzo, we had a similar debate within WordPress.com team when the upper management decided to make it possible for AI bots to crawl WPCOM blogs. The discourse was exactly the same: Always assume that our bloggers and website owners do NOT want AI bots to crawl their site until they explicitly give the consent to do so.

I then noticed that their search engine of choice was Google Search. At first, I thought, “huh, maybe it will be different on Firefox?” but who am I kidding, it is still giving that AI summary thingy. I then switched the default search engine on my Firefox app to DuckDuckGo, and after extensive clicks here and there to deactivate AI-thingy on the said search engine, then I am content. Still, my browser of choice is Vivaldi. Their search engine, Startpage, has been awesome in assisting me. It’s interesting, though, that I had difficulties accessing Startpage when I was in Indonesia. The page kept giving warnings along the line of “we detected massive traffic from your address”, so I assume that they have been getting tons of cyber attacks from hackers wannabes from my country. Dang it. This is why we can’t have nice stuffs.

So! We have Firefox ad, and of course, I got pulled into the vortex of memory and as I watched the videos from 17-20 years ago, I also watched a couple of YouTube Rewind videos.

And, maaaan. Again, all the feels. Some faces already gone from the Internetsphere, some of them decided to step away from the fame for many and different reasons and scandals, and some trends just got banished into obscurity, waiting for the next generation to claim that “we found it first!” (insert old-man-yelling-at-clouds meme here).

YouTube has been my cozy spot. When Threads and Instagram get too chaotic, I usually go to YouTube to decompress. My Subscriptions list is filled with cozy lifestyle YouTubers, journaling YouTubers, and lofi music channels. There are also some musicians who usually appear once in an octarine moon, publish a banger, then go back to their caves (yes, Louie Zong and Shawn Wasabi, I’m looking at you guys.) That said, I’m quite worried when I saw the news that Instagram is rolling out 90-minute horizontal videos feature. I know that this move will make Instagram going head-to-head against YouTube, and honestly, while I know that Google won’t back down that easily, this will make the experience in both spheres going in limbo (not like it hasn’t been really awful for the past decade anyway.)

Honestly, I have been thinking of subscribing to YouTube Premium. I know that this is more like an infinite circle of doom: The service floods their users with ads under the pretense that “we need ads to stay afloat and survive! :(” so the users would subscribe to premium just to get rid of ads, while the tech companies raking more monies. The ads are not even that good anyway. I’m serious. I would watch ads if the ads were like those TV ads that professionally produced. At least where I am located right now, I keep getting those goshdang awful AI slops and crypto ads. Ew.

That said, I found out that YouTube Premium in Malaysia does not offer annual subscription, only monthly-based subscription, which, booo. I know that paying a small amount in monthly basis is preferred among users based in Asia and Latin America (this was our discussion, too, when WPCOM decided to roll out monthly subscription), but in some cases, paying annual subscription would be better in value. Hence, I’m still on edge whether I should click that “Try 2 months for RM 0”.

Now! Speaking about YouTube Premium, that Firefox ad gives me a bit of an idea. If I was YouTube (which, I am not…), I would use the nostalgia as my selling point, hahah. Something like, “missing this kind of YouTube? Support us by subscribing to YouTube Premium!” and, you know, hold the end of your bargain and make sure the YouTube Premium did provide high-quality content, all produced and curated by actual humans. Ka-ching. Stonks.