Also, fuck xfinity and their BS. Can't even change wifi password without downloading an app.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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I've been using the internet since 1996. Newsgroups is about all that was good back then. Oh and email.
Chrome has become the new IE6 and Google the Microsoft of the internet.
Today is a bit of a low point, but I don't think there was any perfect time.
Flash was a major issue during a lot of the "golden years" people are romanticizing. ActiveX was also, and still is, an issue for some parts of the world. Silverlight as well to a lesser extent
If there were any golden years, they probably were when the big three had similar market share between 2009 and 2014. But it was clear what was happening over those years, Chrome was eating IE and waning FF.
Yes apps are bad news.
What drives me mad is that 99.7% of the time you should be able to do everything through the browser without installing the 107th app. But they REALLY have to access your camera, microphone, files, location and body temperature in order to use the same shitty HTML wrapper just to show two input fields and some text.
Yep. Phone have gone horrible wrong and ended up in a duopoly. It is hard for new phone platform to get started. Hell, it's a pain in the ass just have Android without Google services installed. It's such anti-competitive and anti-privacy mess.
You speak correctly.
You are wise beyond your years. In respect I look at the late 90s as maybe my favorite period when the Internet was mostly run by (and used by) smart engineers and techies and not corrupted by misinformation and data mining. IRC was great at doing what discord does today. The web still had fun stuff and shareware was great to explore. Broadband was ramping up so speed was good for people who had it.
Thank you, but I'm getting on a bit now. I'd settle for my wiseness approaching my years!
I'm not sure I have favourite internet decade. Even today has it's upsides. Probably more open code used running and accessing the internet now than ever. But we now have new problems!
I know smart people, who have used the internet to achieve a high technical skill set, who also believe some pretty crazy conspiracy stuff. Infectious miss-information is everywhere and no one is safe.
I think people romanticize Flash because of all the fun games you could play at Newgrounds, ArmorGames etc, that's where nostalgia hits hard. It's easy to forget the hoards of very shitty sites that didn't need Flash at all, but were entirely made in it because fuck you. Adobe buying Macromedia definitely didn't help with performance or security.
I heard it rumoured it was written in 32bit x86 and was a mess. That meant porting it to ARM was basically a rewrite. There are open source rewrites. But nothing would ever play everything the same. Flash was riddled with security flaws of both format and implication. Adobe joined im killing it became it was a risk to Adobe not at an asset. Despite it's dominance at the time.