I use so many extensions in my browser it will literally shock me when I use someone else’s computer. Websites will just be massively different, full of ads. Most news sites are just not usable workout some serious script blocking and ad block.
Open browser
Browser demands updates
All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.
Close ten tabs you didn’t open
Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.
Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.
Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.
Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.
Back button doesn’t work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.
Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.
Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.
Add to cart. You are not logged in.
Log in.
CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.
2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.
Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”
Yes. It crashes.
Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.
Give up and use your phone
4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.
App store ad appears for the site you’re already on
Clicking “x” opens the ad anyway.
You close the phone browser
Go outside
Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”
This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.
I think it’s interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you “you just won a free iPod!” and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):
Yet you don’t hear people complain about that as much today. It’s like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don’t see pages out in the open.
I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/
One trick for the “back button doesn’t work” is to right click it and select the page you want to go back to from that list.
Though I do wish back buttons worked on clicks rather than loads or anything a site can override with javascript. I hate the sites that treat scrolling to the next article as a new page. It trains me to not scroll to the next one, even if it looks interesting, because they fuck with my browser like that (even though I can work around it, fuck them for the attempt).
The other day I found one that I’m pretty sure somehow removed the earlier entries from the back button list.
Like removed them removed them or just filled it up with spam “clicks”?
Second one is annoying and shouldn’t be possible but first one is concerning and really shouldn’t be possible. Makes me wonder if there’s a way to access the links in the back list via js. What browser btw?
First one, and Firefox.
I also hate how some sites block middle mouse clicks or ctrl+click, which opens a new tab. So I’m forced to follow the stupid link then either middle click the back button, or right click back - open in new tab
I once responded to one of those “you have items in your cart” emails that I received like a mere half hour after finishing browsing with a “fuck off”, and a short while later somebody responded and said some things and ended with “same to you too”
I immediately replied and said oh wow a real person replied, don’t take it personally, it was directed at the automatic message.
they started berating me and telling me that I should just unsubscribe if I don’t want the emails (that I never fucking subscribed to in the first place???), and then deleted my account and banned me from the store, it seems. I tried to buy something over half a year later, but it was declined without reason, and support told me it was “flagged for fraud” and didn’t elaborate
Oh fuck them
I’m sorry, I can’t read this.
Can someone put it in greentext?
And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.
My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you’d have to wait even more.
In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it’s gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. “Why shouldn’t we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days”
One thing I love about the Linux/FOSS world is that people work on software because they care about it. This leads to them focusing on parts of the system that users often also care about, rather than the parts that Product Management calculated could best grow engagement and revenue per user over the next quarter.
I’m not arguing that all these big frameworks and high level languages are bad, by the way. Making computers and programming accessible is a huge positive. I probably even use some of their inefficient creations that simply would not exist otherwise. And for many small or one-off applications, the time saved in programming is orders of magnitude higher than the time saved waiting on execution.
But when it comes to the most performance sensitive utilities and kernel code in my GNU plus Linux operating system, efficiency gets way more important and I’ll stick with the stuff that was forged and chiseled from raw C over decades by the greybeards.
Oh my fuck, my work has a website and I hate it. There are multiple fields to fill out on a page, and every time you fill one field, the entire page automatically refreshes. I can’t just tab from field to field and fill things out - I have to fill out a field, wait for the refresh, click in the next field, fill it out, wait for the refresh, click in the next field…. until I’m done.
Next, for some reason everything is a floating window and there is no scroll outside of it. Which means that if I click the page wrong, the floating window moves, and I can’t move it back. I lose all progress because the only way to fix it is to refresh the site.
Then there’s the speed. At the end of the day, when everyone is using this site, it gets extremely slow. You’d think this would be a predictable issue that the company could be proactive about, yet every day, right when we’re itching the most to go home, every one of us experiences the dreaded lag. I hadn’t seen lag this bad since I played Sims 2 on an old computer.
“If you have resources, why shouldn’t MY website be using 100% of it?” - web developers since 2017
That’s because in the Celeron 266-300A-350 days we overclockers were as gods! And if you had just moved from a modem connection to a university LAN connection like me, it was peak computer usage.
The way you describe performance then and now makes me wonder if you’re thinking mostly about running SUSE back then and if you’re talking about a Windows (Teams) machine now. I definitely remember things like the right-click menu taking forever to load sometimes on old windows & HDD based systems.
Using Linux on my work & home PCs now after being used to Windows on them first, they have that responsive feel back.
I use Arch BTW.
Teams runs on just about anything, which is part of why it’s so slow.
Back in the day Windows 98 was definitly faster than SUSE on my machine. Drivers back then on Linux were rough and if you wanted to play a game you’d need Windows or DOS for sure.
I only had 56k dialup back then, no fast internet for me.
Gotcha. Something about what you said made it sound like the standard windows flavor to me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten so used to running teams in a browser tab that its lagginess just feels like a slow loading webpage refresh, while the rest of the system’s GUI is flawless.
It’s a two-fold curse - first, every single program these days isn’t a stand-alone program, it’s a glorified web browser. Hand-in-hand with that is the fact that, in order for these webpages-disguised-as-programs to behave in the way you normally expect a modern UI to act, it has to have five layers of javascript frameworks, each adding its own pile of cruft to the slagheap that is modern app design. It’s horrendous and I hate it.
Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE
MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE
And don’t even get me started on payment.
Based Brazil has pix: select payment method, scan qr code with your bank app, pay.
You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.
i always look for the ‘guest’ checkout option. some merchants have it, and i’ll choose them over somewhere like azn if the price is reasonably close.
Yeah but then they pull the old you need to enter everything to get the delivery costs. I understand they need my address to figure out what shipping would cost. But they also require my name, email and phonenumber before showing the shipment costs. So annoying, it makes comparing prices between shops impossible as some shops have higher prices and free shipping, where others have super low prices, but then fuck you on the shipping.
That’s the point at which I assign a shop it’s very own email address and give it a bad phone number (not incorrect, unrouteable)
I love using rockauto for buying car parts for this reason. Basically the whole site works like it’s 2002, in a good way. Enter site. Click the items you need, with easily searchable indexes. Get multiple different brands and choices of same part. Go to checkout. Enter email and zip code you used last time. Enter CC info. Done.
The second last point is the most enraging to me. Either show me a loading overlay or don’t move the items a single pixel!
And the worst part is that the correct way works since HTML 1.0. Give the element a width and a height.
Sad part about this is it’s not comic hyperbole. It’s just literally an average online experience.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
I can hear it now. My kid’s generation is gonna be giving each other shit like "wait, you bought this off a website? Like a millennial?"
Ah, yes. I keep hearing more and more of people buying merchandise through TikTok among some other seemingly app-only interfaces.
I miss “old internet” :(
Two years ago I bought one pair of shoelaces from a website that looked like the old internet. It was fucking great.
Sites so slow they actually crush the browser and overheats the phone. Reddit does that, the imgur site is cursed by performance issue and it’s always loading something. Sometimes I think they’re loading malicious code to mine crypto with my computational respurces for how bad it gets.
we have redlib tho
Old reddit too
ugly af
It’s what a phpBB / vBulletin forum would look like.
If you ask me, goated interface. All the information is there, fast to load.
Not with a good ad and annoyances blocker. I reformatted my hard drive recently and the few pages I had to visit before installing that really opened my eyes to how bad it is, and how most people just live with it being. Hadn’t experienced much of any of these the past several years, and it has gotten a lot worse since I did. I’ve noticed that most people I know who are not that tech-savvy have stopped going to websites or even trying anything online other than a very small selection of apps, and now that makes total sense.
It’s just literally an average online experience.
I am going to refute that claim as I don’t see monitors falling out of windows everyday.
And I am pretty sure people are doing “online” stuff.
Also the thing you’re actually looking for will be on the 3rd result page, buried under a dozen vaguely related items that are the site ''recommendation ‘’ even though you typed the exact reference of the thing you were looking for.
Oh, and those filters on the side? Forget it, they’ll remove results you might actually care to view
- 2025
- Go to any website
- uBlock Origin
- No ads and cookie banners
- Some AI chat assistant named Jill on the bottom right corner
I always ask AI Jill if she wants to fuck.
Well… did she?
Yeah, idk. 2005 internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Nostalgia doing a lot of work here
I can’t see me doing shopping online in 2005
I did. Amazon started selling third-party stuff in 2000 (and wasn’t evil yet).
… that you knew.
Please provide further reading to prove your point
2005 was back when you would open a page and get a cascade of pop-ups, then have to wait for a flash presentation load, play, and then present the option the website had to navigate with
Mostly because of flash and shit speeds.
Don’t toss your monitor, you will need to go to the online store in order to get a new one
yeah cause you cant get one at your local best buy anymore, but someone will certainly harrass you into trying to buy a smart TV
Buying things online in 2005 was certainly better. Ebay was a wild place. You’d get in bidding wars going a dollar at a time. Sometimes you’d walk away with a pretty great deal. Not like now how you’ll go to a garage sale and some dude wants retail for his 4 year golf clubs. That’s in large part due to fb marketplace. It’s straight ruined garage sale finds
Sorry, what exactly about Facebook marketplace? Too low prices, or too high? Or do you just mean the fact that theres no bidding on there? Haven’t been on there in a while so not sure what the correlation is.
Marketplace ruined (affordable) great garage sale finds.
Now some girl will want 300 dollars for her 2 year old vacuume cause that’s what some moron actually paid
Before the internet there were still people who thought their stuff was worth more than it was. I do feel like garage sales in general though have declined so thats a bummer.
Rose tinted glasses. Shopping online in 2005 was absolutely not as simple as 3 clicks.
you missed the part about broken links, pages that wouldnt load because of some random HTML error, oh, and the payment itself either getting rejected or otherwise not working for a long time.
Not to mention the popup ads…
The internet in the 2000s was like a WW1 Trenchline. Noise and graphic content everywhere and one wrong move could cost you life or limb.
I dont exactly remember when it started getting “safer” because I think the same time the internet was getting safer to browse, a lot of Millenial and Zillenial kids were getting smarter and otherwise learning how to not get malware and worms on their PC
I remember arguing with my mum over a banner ad that said “congratulations you’re the 1000th person to visit this page, youve won 1million dollars”
I was really young and I was like mum just put your card in here and get a million dollars its so easy and you always complain about having no money. Its not a scam we just got lucky.
I am lucky neither of my parents had a credit card or any trust for computers.
I only fell for one of those maybe once or twice before I caught on. No money was lost though. just spam/adware
I did manage to get scammed and have my habbo hotel account stolen though, I was also a stupid kid.
So many popup ads, and no adblockers to prevent them.
UX my ass. These “improvements” only hinder the user.
I suppose they never specified it was supposed to be a good user experience?
The X stands for eXploitation.
Dark design patterns
