Comment by dheera
10 days ago
> Would we still get web browsers?
Yes, just that they would not run millions of lines of JavaScript for some social media tracking algorithm, newsletter signup, GDPR popup, newsletter popup, ad popup, etc. and you'd probably just be presented with the text only and at best a relevant static image or two. The web would be a place to get long-form information, sort of a massive e-book, not a battleground of corporations clamoring for 5 seconds of attention to make $0.05 off each of 500 million people's doom scrolling while on the toilet.
Web browsers existed back then, the web in the days of NCSA Mosaic was basically exactly the above
The whitewashing of the past in this thread is something else.
Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads?
The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page?
The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you closed your window?
Heavy flash ads causing your browser to slow to a crawl?
The modern web browsing experience without an ad blocker feels tame compared to the early days of Internet ads.
What you describe sounds like the late nineties to me, not what we had with the technology of (at most) 1990. There are orders of magnitude between available performance and memory on both ends of this decade.
Most of what you describe were the late 1990s/early 2000s, not the days of NCSA Mosaic.
Also
> distracting animated banner ads
These were characteristic of the late 90s, but were way easier to block back then. Just put "0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net" in your /etc/hosts and 99% of them went away. Or send them to 127.0.0.1 and serve a white single pixel GIF with Apache to avoid web browsers hanging on the request.
The popups of the late 90s were easy to get rid of too, all you had to do was disable JS. There were almost zero websites that did anything good with JS back then.
Flash crap? Don't install it if you don't want it.