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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Things we don't have to worry about anymore:

10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...

Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.

Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.

Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.

Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...

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Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.

Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.

Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.

And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!

I don't think I'll ever stop pressing ctrl + s/cmd + s every 5 minutes, the habit is too deeply ingrained at this stage!

I eventually stopped. For the longest time I used CMD+S as a "thinking tool" and would just tap it.

> 10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers

It sucked having them installed by default on your desktop, but I'd argue the availability of numerous ISPs was a good thing that we have lost. Today is far worse, where at most two of Comcast, Charter, Cox, AT&T, and Verizon are the only options for most of the US population.

Sort of, but they were all dial-up providers and it ended up being a race to the bottom, which seemed to be $9.95 a month, full of busy signals, then they all merged.

Seeing something similar today, we have the phone company and cable company, and now we've got a third option of fiber, the same lines being re-sold by 4 different companies, I'm sure in few years we'll be down to two companies.

Win 98 was 32 bit but half-an OS, NT and GNU/Linux were far better.

- Terrible streaming.

WMA files too.

> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'

In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.

Right? The 2000-2010s saw a massive rejection of popups. Blockers became common. Best practices emerged that avoided them like the plague. I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop.

Now popups are fully back as login, sign up, cookie and deal spam. We've actively regressed on this front back to "pop-ups everywhere!"

> I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop.

I hate modals even more than pop-ups. There are valid reasons to use either, but in most cases they are a form of abuse.

Agreed! Usually this came up because someone wanted to add a popup, but call it a modal to sneak past the bad connotation. When really they shouldn't have been doing either and they knew that; just laundering a UX they knew was crappy.

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