I was just venting to a friend about the massive comeback of popups/banners. "We value your privacy" is a huge part, another one is after the first few pixels of scrolling, "Please support/subscribe to xxx today". So the popups may have a bit more of justified content, but there are plenty of them. And this is while using adblock, pi-hole and other stuff.
You‘re right, i didn‘t see it like this. The current state of the web (past years) feels really like in the old times: many nagging „popups“ and despite using blocking solutions you cant get rid of all of them. Wikipedia is a good example: Their yearly call to you to spend for money is using about 1/3 of your vertical screen and you cant remove it. Sadly it seems to be very effective.
The user seems to be posting about UX and navigability rather than ad tracking. Wikipedia's banner ads that take up an entire browser window before you can scroll down to the content is definitely a good example of that.
For some reason storefronts don't seem to understand that when they all do this, it just pushes me to do my shopping through Amazon or some other online "everything store." I'm currently shopping for a new sofa, but the experience of finding reviews and going to individual sites is just so painful. I'm having to dismiss 1 or 2 modal pop-ups per page view AND dismiss a cookie notification bar. It's enough to make a man just go to WayFair instead, but then I'm never sure if I'm getting decent stuff or something off Wish at a 30% markup.
There is absolutely no pleasure in "surfing" the web anymore. If we still use the surfing analogy, it's like trying to surf but being swarmed by seagulls and jumping fish any time you get out into the water.
I think that one is fairly reasonable, since it is the host party doing the advertising for their subscription programme (to their detriment, since nobody wants to be interrupted when browsing content unexpectedly). Banner ads and popups are far more annoying though.
Recently got my older relatives to install Brave, and although I'm not wholly supportive of its business model (which is significantly rooted in crypto and crypto advertising), I can appreciate that my older relatives have begun to see far less scammy popup ads and banners.
There was however a brief moment when there were no ads. I remember it. There were also no search engines so you only found other sites by word of mouth.
- Expensive (remember when you had to pay by the minute)
- It was the early days of the browser war, which IE was winning. Remember the "best viewed" banners. It was one of the worst times for compatibility, you had plugins too: Java, Flash/Shockwave, ...
- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. We like to complain about the remaining 5%, but in the late 90s it was the norm.
- The web was simply smaller, there was less information. Wikipedia didn't exist for instance.
- Ads, terrible design and annoyances have always been a thing. The 90s had popups and blink, the 2000s had flash, and we now have JS.
- Tracking, privacy and security. The 90s web was insecure as hell. Remember there used to be a popup warning you that SSL was used, plain http was the norm. It was less of a concern simply because we used to do less on the web. It was a time when people were calling you crazy for buying something online.
So no, I don't miss it. It is a piece of history that would look nice in the digital equivalent of a museum, but for day to day use... no.
>>- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for.
I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.
Yep. Search for literally anything and you’ll land on an affiliate marketing page disguised as a blog or a review site. When’s the last time you saw a bad review for anything?
According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.
Type "The Cat In The Hat" in a search engine. Surprised to see a Mike Myers film all over the front page?
Or try "Alice in Wonderland".
Search engines are too of the moment — maybe too corporate-bent? Or do we blame the users? Do most people want a bad film when they search rather than a literary classic?
I kind of agree when it comes to the last 5 years, I was specially talking about the late 90s.
In fact, all the points I mentioned are about the late 90s to early 2000s. A lot has changed during that period, and, I think, to something better overall. But it mostly stagnated or even regressed since ~2010, at least for the desktop web, it doesn't mean tech and the internet as a whole did.
It's been very frustrating lately searching for errors in obscure software. Search for ERROR_42 ExampleSoft and you get dozens of pages with content like:
"This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. ERROR_42 is an error that happens on ExampleSoft. In this blog, you will learn about ERROR_42 and how to fix it. First, let me say ERROR_42 ExampleSoft again. ERROR_42 is a very difficult error to fix in ExampleSoft. You first need to make sure you are getting ERROR_42 when running ExampleSoft. I know this because I am an expert in ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft."
This doesn't correlate with my perspective at all. Of course each person will have their own subjective view of those times. I had ADSL in 1998, and before that I had 28.8kbps which wasn't too bad since websites were very lightweight in those days. I didn't use IE unless I had to, as I had Netscape on my Macintosh.
I loved the smaller web, where almost everything you saw was made directly by people who cared about the specific content they were sharing. Business websites were far more humble, and simpler. Web design was super creative and sometimes silly or fun. Further, I think search engines have degraded massively. We had a sweet spot around 2005-2015 maybe? But it's been downhill since. Google Search results are utterly terrible now, regressing back to ~year-2000 quality IMO.
Popups weren't much problem because most of the time I just disabled JS anyways (especially since it slowed sites down a lot), and only turned it on when a site I was trying to use wouldn't work at all. I didn't start leaving JS enabled until it started becoming a real limitation, and probably until the browsers started interpreting JS way faster.
I still think it's crazy how much commerce is transacted online. I understand, but it still blows my mind how everyone everywhere is using this shockingly unstable, insecure network to do... everything. The recent SolarWinds hack is another example how fundamental the problem of security is across all networked digital systems. Of course it's a lot better today than it was in the 90's, but that's just one of very few things that has genuinely improved, IMO.
I am not sure it is a good thing that the web isn't paid for by the minute anymore - I would waste a lot less time if I had to pay for every minute of connectivity.
The "good old days" were never as good as we have them in memory. The medical advances alone make it worthwhile living in the future. Not to mention racism, gender inequality and all other sins of the past. The human race is in a terrible shape today, but it's never been better.
I would argue the analogy extends to the internet. People talk about pageload payloads of today vs 20 years ago, and somehow infer that the web fast faster back in the day. It wasn't - with the gigabit internet connections, we're easily making up for the bloat in payloads.
Also, it's never been easier to quit your 9-5 job and leverage the combination of the internet and globalism to be your own boss. Just because it's still relatively hard, it doesn't mean it's ever been easier.
I mean, I had ADSL in 1998, so yeah it was insanely fast, and web pages were much more lightweight. I've been developing for the web since 1995, which is why I miss those days of the web so much. Even a total newbie to web dev could use pretty much everything available in the HTML spec without much difficulty. Now the learning curve for just a basic web project is colossal by comparison. Further, web pages were more "honest" and straightforward. It wasn't very easy for sneaky or "dark UX patterns" to be implemented, partly because they weren't well-developed by marketing teams, but also because the web specs didn't really provide much to work with.
Computer hardware has advanced to an amazing degree, and software has become more abstract and complex to nicely use up all that processing power -- but the core user interaction with software remains largely the same, without much actual speed increase and with a LOT more cognitive overhead (ads, animations, popovers etc.)
I'm not denying the extremely powerful nature of the services we have available to us now, but more-powerful hardware wasn't really necessary to have that. It's like the thing about technology making it so we don't have to do any work but instead we just work on different things, still for 40+ hours a week. Today, our CPUs are still saturated with work, it's just not the same things as it was back then.. for example, interpreting 5mb of JavaScript to show a chat window or a product page :)
I don't, ad-blockers have become a lot more effective since the late 90's. Arguably, browsing today's web filtered through a modern ad-blocker (such as uBlock Origin) is safer and more enjoyable then browsing the web without an adblocker in the late 90's.
It scares me to think that there's a good chance we'll look back a decade from now and remember this as the golden age of ad blocking. Google getting steadily more powerful doesn't bode well for user freedoms on issues like this. Without a major course correction things like AMP and Manifest V3 are just the start of where things are headed.
