FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Pixelfari 1.0: Downgrade Your Web Browser To 8-bit

Tired of all the high-def imagery we’re subjected to these days? Then give your eyes a break from all that clarity with the lo-fi Pixelfari.

We’re suckers for anything with a pixelated retro aesthetic, blame a childhood sat in front of a TV screen navigating the Mushroom Kingdom or firing hadoukens until our thumbs bled. The familiar chunky form has grown ubiquitous—as a pop cultural reference it works like the benday dots in the enlarged comics of a Roy Lichtenstein painting. And because of our nostalgic attraction and fascination with it as a primary unit of the digital aesthetic, nothing is beyond its fuzzying transformative powers, its ability to catalyze our imaginations. Art works, fictional characters, you, even modern video games (in the form of demakes) get a kind of meta-pixel makeover. And now someone has brought this chunky style to the web browser.

Advertisement

That someone is Neven Mrgan who, along with a friend, has created a low resolution version of Apple’s Safari called Pixelfari. Turning your online world into blurring forms and images that look like your browser’s spent the night on the town. Video doesn’t seem to work on it, but it’s pretty good fun to surf around in a virtual world that looks like someone has downgraded the internet.