Sad part about this is it’s not comic hyperbole. It’s just literally an average online experience.
Not with a good ad and annoyances blocker. I reformatted my hard drive recently and the few pages I had to visit before installing that really opened my eyes to how bad it is, and how most people just live with it being. Hadn’t experienced much of any of these the past several years, and it has gotten a lot worse since I did. I’ve noticed that most people I know who are not that tech-savvy have stopped going to websites or even trying anything online other than a very small selection of apps, and now that makes total sense.
I came here to say this. Often times the pop ups are so bad that I just leave the site. Its almost never worth it
Sites so slow they actually crush the browser and overheats the phone. Reddit does that, the imgur site is cursed by performance issue and it’s always loading something. Sometimes I think they’re loading malicious code to mine crypto with my computational respurces for how bad it gets.
we have redlib tho
Old reddit too
ugly af
It’s what a phpBB / vBulletin forum would look like.
If you ask me, goated interface. All the information is there, fast to load.
Amazon redirecting you to the front page after you decline cookies is just amazingly stupid design.
I often decide I don’t actually need what I was about to purchase when I run into this, and I close out the browser tab and move on.
…I guess in some weird way, the poor experience benefits me!
I can hear it now. My kid’s generation is gonna be giving each other shit like "wait, you bought this off a website? Like a millennial?"
Ah, yes. I keep hearing more and more of people buying merchandise through TikTok among some other seemingly app-only interfaces.
I miss “old internet” :(
Two years ago I bought one pair of shoelaces from a website that looked like the old internet. It was fucking great.
It’s just literally an average online experience.
I am going to refute that claim as I don’t see monitors falling out of windows everyday.
And I am pretty sure people are doing “online” stuff.
it is bad enough on some websites to make me wish I could just use a mail catalog thing
Too relatable
And don’t even get me started on payment.
Based Brazil has pix: select payment method, scan qr code with your bank app, pay.
You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.
i always look for the ‘guest’ checkout option. some merchants have it, and i’ll choose them over somewhere like azn if the price is reasonably close.
Yeah but then they pull the old you need to enter everything to get the delivery costs. I understand they need my address to figure out what shipping would cost. But they also require my name, email and phonenumber before showing the shipment costs. So annoying, it makes comparing prices between shops impossible as some shops have higher prices and free shipping, where others have super low prices, but then fuck you on the shipping.
That’s the point at which I assign a shop it’s very own email address and give it a bad phone number (not incorrect, unrouteable)
I love using rockauto for buying car parts for this reason. Basically the whole site works like it’s 2002, in a good way. Enter site. Click the items you need, with easily searchable indexes. Get multiple different brands and choices of same part. Go to checkout. Enter email and zip code you used last time. Enter CC info. Done.
Honestly like 2/3 of this is handled by the right Firefox plugins but that JavaScript Shuffle bullshit drives me INSANE
MY PHONE IS AN HTML ONLY ZONE
Yeah… I tried that for a while. You don’t go very far on modern internet with JS disabled
Use noscript and whitelist urls as needed. Pages that dont need javascript dont get to use it, and for pages that do need it, you can make sure it only runs exactly what it needs to.
Open browser
Browser demands updates
All extensions update simultaneously. Each opens its own tab to proudly announce bug fixes for bugs you never noticed.
Close ten tabs you didn’t open
Miss one. It autoplays a video ad.
Type in search bar. Autocomplete offers suggestions that are 5 years old, NSFW, or both.
Search for a product. Top results: Ads. Sidebar: Ads. Bottom: Ads. An actual organic result is wedged between an ad and a newsletter signup modal.
Click real-looking result. Redirected to a shady dropshipper site.
Back button doesn’t work. It reloads the same scam page five times. You lose the original tab somewhere in a pile of redirects.
Click Amazon link. It’s a new seller with the business name “USB_Cable_Amazon_Partner_Official.” 13,000 reviews. All 5 stars.
Try to read reviews. Most are for the wrong product. Many are AI-generated gibberish. The rest complain about shipping.
Add to cart. You are not logged in.
Log in.
CAPTCHA challenge: Pick all the traffic lights. Traffic lights are 1 pixel wide. One is technically a lamppost. Verification failed.
2 factor authentication push. By the time you get the authenticator open, the session expired. Start over.
Try to close browser. Are you sure you want to close 37 tabs?”
Yes. It crashes.
Reopens all 37 tabs next launch.
Give up and use your phone
4 popups, fingerprint required, and every link jumps when the page loads because of delayed ad banners.
App store ad appears for the site you’re already on
Clicking “x” opens the ad anyway.
You close the phone browser
Go outside
Get a push notification: “You left items in your cart.”
One trick for the “back button doesn’t work” is to right click it and select the page you want to go back to from that list.
Though I do wish back buttons worked on clicks rather than loads or anything a site can override with javascript. I hate the sites that treat scrolling to the next article as a new page. It trains me to not scroll to the next one, even if it looks interesting, because they fuck with my browser like that (even though I can work around it, fuck them for the attempt).
I also hate how some sites block middle mouse clicks or ctrl+click, which opens a new tab. So I’m forced to follow the stupid link then either middle click the back button, or right click back - open in new tab
The other day I found one that I’m pretty sure somehow removed the earlier entries from the back button list.
Like removed them removed them or just filled it up with spam “clicks”?
Second one is annoying and shouldn’t be possible but first one is concerning and really shouldn’t be possible. Makes me wonder if there’s a way to access the links in the back list via js. What browser btw?
First one, and Firefox.
I think it’s interesting that in 2005, the internet had a ton of popups and scammy ads that told you “you just won a free iPod!” and everyone knew that was a thing. There was even a gag about it in Scary Movie 3 (2003):
Yet you don’t hear people complain about that as much today. It’s like so much of the internet has been cordoned off into walled gardens that most users don’t see pages out in the open.
Those popups were so prolific that all browser developers responded by implementing popup blockers.
Which kind of led to the absolute mess of banner ads (and the adblockers created in response) that we still have today. I dare you to deactivate your adblocker on any of the major (commercial) news sites.
I also recall not a single one of those builtin popup blockers working as intended, random popups would show up anyway. Hell, that feature still leads to annoyances when a site actually needs to open a new window (happens with some internal systems being used where I work)
I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/
This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.
I once responded to one of those “you have items in your cart” emails that I received like a mere half hour after finishing browsing with a “fuck off”, and a short while later somebody responded and said some things and ended with “same to you too”
I immediately replied and said oh wow a real person replied, don’t take it personally, it was directed at the automatic message.
they started berating me and telling me that I should just unsubscribe if I don’t want the emails (that I never fucking subscribed to in the first place???), and then deleted my account and banned me from the store, it seems. I tried to buy something over half a year later, but it was declined without reason, and support told me it was “flagged for fraud” and didn’t elaborate
Oh fuck them
You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?
Because phones. The reason behind fucking up scrolling is phones. Swipe upwards once and get the next pretty animated scrolling to the precise place, wooo!
I’m sorry, I can’t read this.
Can someone put it in greentext?
Also the thing you’re actually looking for will be on the 3rd result page, buried under a dozen vaguely related items that are the site ''recommendation ‘’ even though you typed the exact reference of the thing you were looking for.
Oh, and those filters on the side? Forget it, they’ll remove results you might actually care to view
It used to be that the ads, viruses and tracking were on the web pages, but now we are so blessed that they are built into our browsers and operating systems! Talk about optimization!
Don’t worry, they are still in the web pages too
UX my ass. These “improvements” only hinder the user.
The X stands for eXploitation.
Dark design patterns
Our target audience is people with cognitive disabilities who still have access to a credit card.
I suppose they never specified it was supposed to be a good user experience?
Yeah, idk. 2005 internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Nostalgia doing a lot of work here
Please provide further reading to prove your point
2005 was back when you would open a page and get a cascade of pop-ups, then have to wait for a flash presentation load, play, and then present the option the website had to navigate with
I can’t see me doing shopping online in 2005
I did. Amazon started selling third-party stuff in 2000 (and wasn’t evil yet).
… that you knew.
Hitting myself with the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind machine
Websites in 2005 never had annoying popups and obnoxious JavaScript and a thousand bad design decisions that made using them terrible.
Everything was so easy back then and you could always trust your anonymous Internet retail vendor to do exactly what you paid them for.
OK. Someone please drop a comment to this post telling me how to make all the “sign in to Google” and “Allow Essential Cookie” popups to go away. uBlock filter list?
There’s a cookie popup blocker in the filter lists by default. You can just enable it and it will dissapear 90% of cookie popups
You can block the Google popup by adding:
||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframeTo your uBlock Origin filter
Consent-O-Matic should make the cookie popups less of a problem at least.
Oh man that sounds so great
Click link
Already installed🗿Feels chad man.
If you encounter web pages where consent-o-matic doesn’t work, you can report them.
Though it might take a while if the page is unpopular.
The second last point is the most enraging to me. Either show me a loading overlay or don’t move the items a single pixel!
And the worst part is that the correct way works since HTML 1.0. Give the element a width and a height.
Use Librewolf + Ublock origin with cookie popups filter turned on and medium mode on when needed.
I ended up using Librewolf on my Steam Deck for a weird reason - Firefox video files were stuttery when played full screen, Librewolf’s are not. No idea why.
Ublock origin is the only way to fly these days. I’ve walked a few family members through using the Element Zapper and explained how the plugin identifies which domain is loading the content and why websites do that now. They’ve all taken to it pretty well.
Having a default backup browser for sites that give too much grief when they can’t get all of their spyware to work correctly definitely keeps me sane and made adoption less stressful for the uninitiated. I give myself three or four tries to make a shitty site work before either abandoning the site and trying an alternative or, if it’s important and necessary, loading it raw in the backup browser.
+1 for LibreWolf too. Dope project.
Yeah, Librewolf is kinda the best web browser. I still need to use Firefox for some things that just have to be invasive, like I think my bank needs the browser to be a little less locked down, but man I love just browsing the web and only seeing what I want to see.
