Comment by dheera

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.