Comment by Nursie
1 day ago
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
Why do I keep seeing, "it's not as bad as that" as a defense? It's still bad!
It's not a defense particularly, it's just that it's not the same sort of experience. The old popups were so bad I was regularly killing the browser process just to make them go away. Now there's a lot less they can do, thank god.
We have the browser (and extension) people to thank for this of course, not advertisers who would still be doing it if they could.
The one saying it’s not as bad are probably the same ones whose salary depends on their users’ engagement with those same pop ups.
Remember how wild pop-ups on the early web could be: https://youtu.be/LSgk7ctw1HY
Computing history is rife with examples of APIs that would never have existed, had the API designer stepped back for a few seconds and asked himself "Why am I letting developers do this?" Someone deliberately added the ability to move the browser window around and pop up other browser windows, yet somehow never imagined this use case???
Thinking of all the possible ways some assholes could abuse a new functionality is an acquired skill, and one I believe eventually makes you stop coming up with any ideas.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
2 replies →
Computing history is rife with examples of API designers who get attacked for building walled gardens and denying user power when they ask such questions. There was a time, for example, when "data portability" was widely understood to mean that Facebook should let Google programmatically extract your data and forward it to fourth parties (https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google...).
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
Social dynamics in the digital world are completely different from anything known to man before the internet. Imagine someone from 2090 coming over and saying "aren't you afraid that your friend will literally take a knife and stab you in the back during your birthday party". Technically he's not wrong, but come on, it doesn't happen really. And then you learn that in 2080's something similar was a major societal problem.
Yeah sometimes you’d have to just powercycle the computer if they started cascading too fast and bogging down the system. People would make websites specifically to troll and do this.