The funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
It's not a defense particularly, it's just that it's not the same sort of experience. The old popups were so bad I was regularly killing the browser process just to make them go away. Now there's a lot less they can do, thank god.
We have the browser (and extension) people to thank for this of course, not advertisers who would still be doing it if they could.
Yeah sometimes you’d have to just powercycle the computer if they started cascading too fast and bogging down the system. People would make websites specifically to troll and do this.
Computing history is rife with examples of APIs that would never have existed, had the API designer stepped back for a few seconds and asked himself "Why am I letting developers do this?" Someone deliberately added the ability to move the browser window around and pop up other browser windows, yet somehow never imagined this use case???
Thinking of all the possible ways some assholes could abuse a new functionality is an acquired skill, and one I believe eventually makes you stop coming up with any ideas.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
It doesn't keep you from coming up with ideas, it just keeps you coming up with ideas to mitigate the harms. The obvious one that's usually neglected is giving users the power to disable/limit/control behaviors that are likely to be abused.
We wouldn't need to bother with installing addons to limit javascript and block ads if those were just part of the browser to start with. Every new feature added should have options that put users in control of if, when, and how it gets used. Right now, even the browsers that give users the most control usually don't go farther than an enable/disable flag in about:config
This is exactly right. The end user should be in the driver's seat, not the web developer. Often when I use computers today, I feel like a passenger, going wherever the developer is choosing to take me. So much browser development and innovation lately serves to empower the developer and enable them to do things to your computer, but with very little empowerment reserved for the user.
Computing history is rife with examples of API designers who get attacked for building walled gardens and denying user power when they ask such questions. There was a time, for example, when "data portability" was widely understood to mean that Facebook should let Google programmatically extract your data and forward it to fourth parties (https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google...).
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
Social dynamics in the digital world are completely different from anything known to man before the internet. Imagine someone from 2090 coming over and saying "aren't you afraid that your friend will literally take a knife and stab you in the back during your birthday party". Technically he's not wrong, but come on, it doesn't happen really. And then you learn that in 2080's something similar was a major societal problem.
I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
I think what would have happened if the web didn't have scripting languages was that you would be forced to download java applets... which now can also run on javascript/wasm coming full circle.
Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
What you are asking for are static pages which already exists and most people do use static pages due to it being very easy to deploy on github pages etc. , though I wonder we would've way more abundance of static pages as compared to non static pages, like there are some pages which could've been static but they aren't.
Though I still think the difference would've existed & it could've been net positive IDK, I just like to go create websites as apps which can be booted on any pc,device without worrying about anything, installing and running it would likely require a setup and it would've been a bigger hassle as well.
And well noone's stopping you from doing it right now. There's gopher and gemini if you are interested.
Kind of agree, maybe static pages wasn't the right word but rather static pages without js /minimal js that anybody can read and vet unlike those minified js that we get from frameworks...
> Also, java's dominance I guess was the reason that javascript is named after inspiration of java.
Very loosely, was named that was as an marketing ploy as Java was the new language at the time.
JavaScript is actually ECMAScript or a v.close direlect of. Originally it was called Mocha, and then relabeled to LiveScript and during the NetScape / Sun Microsystems thing, changed itself to JavaScript and Oracle carried it on from there.
I dunno, I think it was a net negative by a large margin. 1) html only Gmail shows that pretty advanced, well made apps are possible without scripting; 2) There are very few web apps that without JavaScript wouldn't just be implemented as native without loss of convenience; 3) OTOH for simple apps and sites JavaScript adds inconvenience (non standard links breaking browser features etc), security risks, compatibility issues, massive bloat and tracking.
Nothing like 3 paragraphs of text that requires downloading 2 megabytes of crap, runs code from 20 sketchy looking domains, takes 15 seconds to load, cannot be linked to, and demands you upgrade your browser. As a consolation you can have slightly slower maps in browser instead of downloading an app, once.
I think web scripting is probably THE worst technology ever invented in the IT field. "If I ruled the world", a full ban would be better than its current state; or some AMA on steroids (+Jones act) making JavaScript developers extremely rare and well paid, so that it was limited to the best (as determined by the market) uses with better quality.
You can't think about alternate web evolution without considering (1) the early browser wars (specifically Netscape vs IE) & (2) the need to decouple data transfer and re-rendering that led to AJAX (for network and compute performance reasons).
Folks forget that before js was front-end frameworks and libaries, it was enabling (as in, making impossible possible) async data requests and page updates without requiring a full round-trip and repaint.
It's difficult to conceptualize a present where that need was instead fully served by HTML+CSS, sans executable code sandbox.
What, ~2000 IE instead pushes for some direct linking of HTML with a async update-able data model behind the scenes? How are the two linked together? And how do developers control that?
I wrote JavaScript before libraries, I remember when prototype.js came out and was a cool new thing and actually useful after "client side validation and snowflakes chasing mouse cursor" era. I think there was a short period when it was a positive development.
It seemed so at the time but I think it didn't work out... Why is interesting to speculate about... My pet theory that convenient frameworks lowering the barriers were part of the problem.
I think if at it's time JavaScript went the way of java applets and ActiveX controls (and yes I understand part of the reason these could be driven out is availability of JavaScript), web would be in a much better shape right now. 90% of the apps (banking, email, forums, travel, etc) and 100% of the pages would just be plain better. For the remainder you'd just install an app, something they nag you about anyway.
You're correct that the main thing enabled by JS is partial updates, but the fact that it relies on JS is IMO itself in large part due to path dependent evolution (i.e. JS was there and could be used for that, so that's what we standardized on).
Imagine instead if HTML evolved more in the direction of enabling this exact scenario out of the box. So that e.g. you could declaratively mark a button or a link as triggering a request that updates only part of the page. DOM diffs implemented directly by the browser etc.
I was thinking more along the latter lines - i.e. the link/button would specify the ID of the element to update, and it would be replaced with the received HTML.
If we're unwinding back to early 00s though, it could also be fetching XML from the server and then running it through the XSLT stylesheet associated with the current document to convert it to HTML, to reduce the amount of data on the wire.
The specifics could be debated here. But I'm pretty sure that a generic mechanism could be devised that'd adequately cover many use cases that require JS today.
The modern web has successfully liberated applications from mostly vendor locked OS environments into mostly agnostic browser environments. I think this has been a good thing.
Otherwise, with just CSS and HTML, you'd have a web strictly dedicated to publishing. A read only experience curated by those who are willing to invest the time and tooling into being a publisher.
Even then with the advent of RSS and other data exchange formats it's arguable we didn't even need that part of the web. It would be far better for publishing to deliver headlines and summaries via RSS and then allow me to purchase full content and issues digitally.
I think the bigger complication in the creation of the web was the complete lack of payment systems and user trust in entering their payment information into these platforms. So only the large well moneyed entities like advertisers were willing to absorb that risk and built out the platform. Instead of us conveniently and safely paying creators for content we now have aggressive advertisers who litter the web so publishers can shake pennies out of the CPM tree.
Everything is perfectly static and linear, and instead of popups we get full-page ads, double-full-page ads sometimes, and ad inserts in the rest of the pages, with stealth marketing for the content left.
The fundamental issue is not technology IMHO. Scripting can make it worse, but it wouldn't have been great in the first place.
We would have ended up with Flash and then Chrome, just as we did. Client-side programming is essential to creating certain experiences, and with all great powers comes the extractive shit, etc. This is typically where economists will claim the free market is producing an efficient outcome; regulation would be the only preventative, and that’s anathema to tech libertarians.
Doesn't always work (sometimes it kills the website functionality), and I have no clue what it's actually doing (I'm not a coder)... but usually it gets rid of hover-overs.
Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.
> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
I don’t know if hindsight is quite right. There were people raising alarms about this when Chrome initially came out and repeatedly as it grew in popularity. Especially when sites started requiring Chrome. It’s just they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or brushed aside because right now Chrome is faster and the present is all that matters. This was 100% pushed by tech enthusiasts and web developers… the average person would’ve otherwise stuck with their OS default browser.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.
Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.
