Foxkeh Dance is back!

That’s right! Everyone’s favorite dancing mascot is back, baby!

Back in 2008, Alex Polvi (of Firefox crop circle fame), departed Mozilla to found his own startup. In one of the most epic farewell emails of all time, he created Foxkeh Dance, a Mozilla flavor of the Internet-classic Hampster Dance site.

Alas, domains expire, and for the last 5 years foxkehdance.com has been the home of a domain squatter hoping to interest you in the usual assortment of spam. But a few weeks ago, I randomly  checked the site, and discovered it was available for registration! So I grabbed the domain, and set about restoring it.

The ever-amazing Archive.org has a cached version of the original 7-year-old site from August 24th 2008… Mostly. It has the HTML, but not the images or background music. Luckily a couple of contemporaneous Mozilla community sites included copies of the animated images, and from that I was able to restore what I believe are original versions. (Update: it seems archive.org is now using these newly-restored images to fill in their incomplete cache. Curious.) While the original embedded “hamster.mp3” file is lost, I remember it a being a straight copy of the Hampster Dance site, and that’s easily available. Of course, the original site used plugins to play sound, so I’ve updated it to use a modern HTML5 <audio> replacement.

And now Foxkehdance.com is back!

For those unfamiliar, Foxkeh is Mozilla Japan’s cartoon mascot. Recently it’s been the unofficial mascot of the new Tracking Protection feature in Firefox (butt flames and all). I hope we’ll see more of the ‘lil guy in the future!

You may now resume dancing.