The end of the Googleverse

thehatfox@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 388 points –
The end of the Googleverse
theverge.com
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The whole internet used to be like this and it was lovely.

Let's not romanticize the old web too much. It had its problems too:

  • Half-done html pages with under_construction.gif or cliparts copypasted from Word. Some went through multiple editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver which ended up producing spaghetti HTML.

  • Autoplaying midi from songs probably from Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Blink 182, etc. Did I mention that MIDI volumes count as separate from normal 'Media' volumes, and were often cranked to the MAX?

  • It was a time when HTML/CSS/JS would chaotically intertwine with proprietary plugins like Flash and ActiveX. "Best viewed from Internet Explorer at 800x600" was a thing. Readability? Accessibility? Forget about it.

  • You paid by minute on dial-up connection until ADSL appeared. Good luck trying to download that tenchi_muyo_hentai.jpg.

That was more the 90s - the time of things like Geocities - than the 2000s.

By the 2000s there had already been one Internet Boom & Bust and things on the Internet were way more comercialized than is earlier times of handmade sites, pre-CSS webpages and ActiveX components.