Do you miss the Gameboy-in-a-garbage-disposal grinding noise of your old dial-up modem, and the fevered anticipation of waiting three hours to download a single song? Is there something missing in your life? Do you seek out the most deep-fried, pixelated-looking Y2K-core gifs for your Insta stories? Do you want to make yourself feel really, really old?
If the answer to any of these questions is Yes, you will love this 1999-style Britney Spears “desktop” site, created to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her debut album, …Baby One More Time.
YES, TWENTY. TWO-ZERO.
It looks like an old Windows 95 desktop, complete with desktop icons and a Trash folder. (There’s not nothing in there, btw.)
There’s a documents folder with images of Britney, which you can use to change the desktop wallpaper.
Remember when you used to just hoard random studio photos of your faves, instead of reaction GIFs? Simpler times!
And there’s a Britney chatbot (Itz Britney Bot!!!) with an icon that looks like the MSN figure, but pink and #skinny with blonde pigtails.
She’ll ask you about your mood today, then help you make playlists full of classic Britney tracks and a selection of other millenium-era hits, including TLC and N*SYNC (which you can then save under your Spotify or Apple Music accounts).
It’s pretty basic stuff, but that’s the point: when …Baby One More Time came out, we were much easier to impress. You could call a song ‘E-Mail My Heart’ and put a hot chick in a schoolgirl outfit from K-Mart and everyone would absolutely lose their minds for it.
And it was a beautiful, simpler time.
Using a Start button to open the different functions and switching between them using the taskbar feels weirdly comforting, even on a smartphone.
For anyone who was old enough to Use The Computer in 1999, it’s a really sweet reminder of a time when the internet was a special treat, not the thing that ruled our entire lives 24/7; listening to music meant buying one CD single or painstakingly saved-up-for (ahem, or ripped) album at a time; and we had to get our sexual awakenings from midriff tops, not easily accessible free porn.
When I opened the little web browser, it even briefly showed the plain-text version of the homepage for a few moments, all blue links in Times New Roman font like a Geocities website – although given that I haven’t been able to replicate that, it might have actually been my crappy broadband connection hitting dialup speed for real.
Britney may have brought us ‘E-mail My Heart’, but maybe Australian internet is the ultimate in 90s nostalgia.