I really wish I could experience the web back then at 1993 (I'm 25). I imagine much faster, and intuitive websites than nowadays. Beautiful UX is one thing but making a website feels natural, that's what I think the internet is missing today.
The amazing part was that everyone had a homepage at some point, where they put content online about topics that they thought was worth sharing.
Even girls in school had a website with sparkling rainbow gifs and a guestbook, and some pages about topics they liked... like smallville series character details, some cake recipes or games that they played. Oh boi have I read way too many things about dragons or vampires in historic literature.
Those websites were usually hosted at all those ad driven freehosters like geocities or funpic, so they sometimes injected their own ads to fund the hosting costs.
But honestly, I'd take the old version of the internet any time again over the dumpster fire that is social media propaganda and coordinated/incinerated defamatory shitstorms these days.
The internet was a welcoming place for everyone, where people shared what they loved with others. The internet was a nice place. And then, the facebook and the chans happened, and everything kinda went to shit.
I remember it took about 20-30 minutes to download an mp3 in the dialup days. Most websites were in the kilobytes because everyone was on dialup. Also keep in mind most screens would have been 640x480, so it's not like you were getting high res images.
Depends on the amount of gifs people were placing on their website :D We only had a 56k modem at the time. The Browser was provided by the ISP at first due to lack of dial-up software that supported the German ISPs, so it was loading all kinds of injected stuff from the ISP, too.
But yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that websites usually loaded way faster if you were using e.g. IE3 on purpose because it didn't load all the stylesheets and images.
Now that I think back the computers "acted" really differently from what we use today.
Things felt much more "immediate" (as in the computer responded to you very quickly) but also much slower; imagine that your keystrokes occurred immediately but opening a window took 50ms.
If the CPU was being hit with any kind of load though, the input would buffer and your keystrokes would stop being presented until the GUI got some CPU time again and all your keystrokes just poured into the active window.
The web itself was a lot of slowly rendering webpages, the sites themselves would actually start loading much quicker than modern sites, and the content would progressively load over some amount of time, there was usually a progress bar at the bottom of the Web Browser.
I know I'm only a few years older than you, but I wonder if you remember all this.
From what I recall the most annoying thing was slowly rendering images.
Pages were anything but intuitive, there were no design standards. Most marketing pages looked like their art director imagined a futuristic movie prop.
There's still a ton of interesting pages out there, check out this collection: https://www.hoverstat.es/
- Peter Ferrie's homepage (http://pferrie.epizy.com/?i=1), old school: approx. 900ms
- Netflix landing page (https://www.netflix.com/de-en), modern: approx. 1.8s
Measured via Firefox "load time". Peter Ferrie is a famous security researcher.
The Netlix page is clearly 2x as slow, but the load time is far from proportional to the overall data transfer.
The HN front page, right now, takes approx. 1.7s. :)
I’d say, compare it to Reddit or Pinterest or something like that.
It feels like websites are a lot jankier today. The old web was slow, but it was predictable. Like I know a site where if you don't wait for it to finish to load (and it's javascript loading, so you get no browser indication that it's actually loading), then the all the links will be wrong. That is, you get the wrong content if you click a link. It's quietly kind of amazing how they've managed to break hyperlinks, given they're a part of HTML itself and work well out of the box.
Full screen bing.com-backgrounds weren't really a thing in web design, though. Except in porn, I guess.
But there's plenty of websites out there still - including HN - that do without all of those extras. And it's up to web developers of today to resist using the fanciest technologies to build websites.
At some point there was the concept of (iirc) progressive web apps, where the basis was all HTML - fully functional, you could turn off JS and CSS and it'd still work - and then use CSS and JS to add functionality on top, but that would be purely embellishment.
I remember when some supergenius sent the first email as a word document with a 2 mb company logo embedded, and loading that took some 20 minutes - each minute being metered indivdually, only to then contain two lines of text that ought have been the mail body...
The internet was better back in the day - but it was not faster.
That's called progressive JPEG, and it's still around.
Oh no; they weren't faster because computers and browsers weren't nearly as fast as they are today (iirc it was Chrome that emphasized performance, especially JS performance because it saw how much more that was going to be used (for ads lmao)), and not intuitive because there weren't as much guidelines or awareness of UX as there are today.
There should be plenty of websites from the 90's on archive.org
It was an easier time back then.
In the meantime computers and the internet became so fast that websites could be very fast by default, but the front-end tech stack and adtech still makes it slow most of the time.