My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
Pop up ads. You’d be on a webpage and suddenly you’d be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.
“Pop-up blocking” was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn’t want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.
Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.
Opera didn’t use chromium back then.
Chrome was kind of late to the web browsers market.
Opera was initially released on 10 April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers still actively developed. It was commercial software for its first ten years and had its own proprietary layout engine, Presto. In 2013, it switched from the Presto engine to Chromium.
Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.
Pop-ups but not ads. They have moved to restrict what adblockers can block with newer versions of chromium.
Google has probably done more than any other major web company to ensure that ads aren’t allowed to harm users — whether through unsolicited pop-ups, malware, or other attacks.
Malware ads used to be commonplace on ad networks; with “legitimate” websites like CNN.com showing ads (served via a third-party ad network) that attacked security holes in Windows users’ browsers.
Ask anyone who worked in IT in the early 2000s. Web ads used to be a shitpit. Now they’re annoying at most.
Sure but now everyone is at parity with regards to blocking ads and malware, but Google is intentionally rolling some of that back. I won’t say they’re ‘evil’ or anything (at least in this instance) but they’re definitely greedy and there are much better options out there (though chromium makes up a huge majority of the market)
When we’re talking about a for-profit corporation’s actions, “they did it for profit!” is not typically a very useful thing to say.
This is because no matter what they do, they’re doing it because they expect to profit from it.
When a for-profit corporation does something that’s good for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that good thing will cause them to profit.
When a for-profit corporation does something that’s bad for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that bad thing will cause them to profit.
So really, we can just note that we’re referring to a for-profit corporation’s actions, and just say whether they’re doing something that’s good or bad.
And we can try to ensure that good behaviors are profitable and bad behaviors aren’t profitable.
But saying “it’s for profit!!” doesn’t by itself mean that it’s good or bad; just that a for-profit organization did it.
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
I don’t miss Java. Fuck Java.
You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.
So many good Java things in that old web…
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.
Those were good days.
XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.
But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript’s function for “automatically fetch more data from the server”)
Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and “magic”, the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.
I remember when XMLHttp first came out, such a game changer.
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
The system is down.
Checkin’ my email with the lightswitch rave,
Checkin’ my email, make your moms behave.
The wild west part was the best part. It felt real. Now it’s all watered down.
It was also a barrier to entry. Especially to advertisers but alas that did not last.
Also a big pro
Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. “Don’t give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!” Shit I don’t want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it’s bringing people together. It’s not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.
Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.
There also used to be a huge stigma with being infamous online. Like, you were seen as an actual loser if your only claim to fame was online and not anything worthwhile in real life. That’s such an interesting turn of events where by the mid to late 2000s, people were getting crazy popular online and actually earning revenue for it through YouTube and it has built up since with the likes of Twitch, OnlyFans .etc
I was there way before “wild west”. Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.
But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.
Our “search engine” was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.
mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.
edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.
Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.
They’re only as strong as long as there’s persistence. But, that doesn’t mean that when it is used, it won’t have an affect. People have been getting arrested and charged for alluring people to kill themselves online. Whereas, back then, it felt like quite an uphill battle because everyone would’ve just told you to block the person or close the IM window.
File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn’t have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you’d be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.
Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.
you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Looks at Twitter and Facebook…
Uhhhh… Who’s going to tell them that’s still a really big issue? lol
Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin’ BonziBuddy…
Many different search engines with many different results. Searching for stuff was not very intuitive.
The wild west atmosphere was rather cool being a teenager, I must say.
Nowadays, Google just gives you results. Relevance may vary.
DuckDuckGo can give you more accurate results, but feels thin.
And search engines like Bing and Google, try too hard on being swiss army knives that do everything. From calculating to weather to showing movies from local theaters. Anything they do to keep you glued to them.
That logo appearing when the image wouldn’t load.
internet explorer sucked then and still sucks now
iE doesn’t exist anymore, does it?
For companies that rely on microshit services, internet explorer is actually the duct tape and elmer’s glue that holds their intranet together
i think it was replaced by microsoft edge when windows 10 came out IIRC
Microsoft hilariously butchered the introduction of Edge, which showed a logo that was strikingly similar to IE. They’ve sworn up and down that Edge wasn’t like IE. But Edge, behaved similarly to IE. It took Microsoft a few years to finally give Edge it’s own identity and more or less, better functionality.
No mention of Mosaic (first web browser)? What sucked was you generally had to compile it yourself. That meant installing all the build tooling, building it, and turning it loose. Oh. Windows? Lol. No go. Gotta get an early version of Linux up and running first. That usually meant 20+ diskettes of Slackware installation.
But then you could surf in all the basic HTTP glory. It was a new world and it was awesome.
Removed by mod
