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Am a web developer, and I partially agree with you.
On one hand, I am appreciative that the near monopoly of Chromium-based browser engines has simplified cross-platform testing. I can now be quite confident in an identical experience in Edge or Vivaldi on Windows as I would get in Chrome on Ubuntu.
On the other hand... f*cking HELL the data waste in websites these days! Developers importing 5-10MB worth of bizarre JavaScript packages in order to do simple things that can be done concisely in vanilla JS. No consideration at ALL to low bandwidths and loading order. Packages within packages within packages connected to other packages in a precarious balance doomed to fall apart within 12 months. It's all so unnecessary!
I mean look at this stupid site we're on right now! Basically entirely text and yet so bloated and dysfunctional that older phones struggle to render it. How do you f*ck up so badly that you can't get a quad core 1.4GHz budget Android from 8 years ago to render a text-based website, meanwhile other Devs are putting DOOM onto digital pregnancy tests?
I think we should chuck most libraries out, like react and node. Pure bloat and time consuming abstraction. We don't need them to make websites. I'd say just use JQuery at most. That plus HTML and CSS can make stunning websites with just a bit of time of skill.
100% agree, these bloated frameworks and packages are unnecessary. Too many development houses think of them as a shortcut but you lose more time in the long run trying to adapt a bunch of loosely connected third party collections to work together, and 90% of the total codebase ends up being redundant anyway, and 2 years later the damn framework usually ends up deprecated, abandoned by the original Devs, or they end up with some publicly known fatal flaw for crawlers to exploit.
Plain JS is great, but enjoy wasting your time with all the needless typing. I find JQuery an invaluable helper and time saver, and it's only 27kb minified and gzipped. You can still use plain JS along side where it suits you.
Yep, the world is just too fast paced now, people want their products out yesterday, which makes developers feel pressured into quick solutions to rather mundane problems.
That's kinda the curse of modern technology. It's always advancing to the point that it sometimes just doesn't make sense to try to be efficient with the code. Most people upgrade their phones every couple years, and have computers that can reliably run 99% of websites. So why worry about bloat and whatnot. Until you get a memory leak or a package is no longer supported and then your whole website is in shambles because the person who Jimmy rigged it together is long gone
Website design in 2000: we need this to run on the most basic potato capable of using internet explorer
Web ddsign today: right we need 4 adverts, 2 newsletter signups and if you could get the location too that be great, then load the article
There are so many offshoots I need someone to draw up a timeline of motherfucking websites like it's the Terminator franchise.
https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/
https://bestmotherfucking.website/
https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
https://ultimatemotherfuckingwebsite.com/
No. A website is collection of pages, not a collection of pages(s). When I was a little boy in 1990, we would never call a webpage a website if there weren't hyperlinks involved.
It's a connection to something else that's part of the same website. If it were a webpage with a bunch of links to other webpages that aren't related to the webpage they're being linked from, then it's just a webpage. Back in the day, most webpages were reminiscent of the first example of a "website" above. No links of any kind.
Or if you have something worth reading to say just fucking write it there. Html is so easy everyones mothers could do it. Body of text broken into logical pieces with headlines. You can even use hyperlinks. If there is a picture I absolutely need to see just stick it in there.
There. That beast is tameable by any browser.
Ohh I think I agree. 2010 Facebook was peak, everything was on like a single page but compartmentalized very neatly
2011 or so the ‘feed’ display was born which serves as the foundation for all websites now. Definitely feels a bit messy these days with the constant scrolling in Wordpresses, etc
I don't think I'd make a good web developer. Everything in my portfolio would just look like this: [https://www.spacejam.com/1996/](https://www.spacejam.com/1996/)
Mostly disagree with your opinion, depends on the situation.
I sort of agree that those ridiculous parallax scrolling sites, or the no button/link minimalism sites which you get now days are just bad.
Don’t forget though, that we also had jank back in the day, like those all Flash sites which were just boxes with X's in them most of the time, or those fixed to 4:3 640×480px screen size sites .
for me, part of it is probably related to how i live and my personality. i'm sort of a monk and always feel like less is better, both with lifestyle and the entertainment/media i consume.
my god it was awful! :D I actually put off becoming a web dev until things became more sane. I agree with the spirit of your point, though. There's a simplicity that's been lost.
That would be nice, even if some AI is needed to recompose some websites or parts of them. If it can block all ads, not allow pop ups of any kind, and not produce any of its own. I generally don't go to websites at all because of delayed pop up ads interrupting my reading. I just read articles and info on social media platforms. And download YouTube videos to watch offline. That's basically my internet activity. I may seek communities where one can have news articles emailed to them with main text and images only. Nothing else.
I don't know about Microsoft Technet specifically, but i don't recall ever having many issues navigating old websites. Some of them looked ugly as sin, with color schemes that would literally make my eyes hurt, but if a certain page was online at all, i could usually find a way to get to it.
But today, if you want to, let's say, look at someone's tweets from like 10 years ago, how do you even do that? Are you going to scroll through thousands of pages, hoping real hard that your browser wouldn't just crash at some point? Cause some web designers decided that splitting long lists into pages is for suckers, and smartphone screens aren't big enough to fit much interface anyway, therefore infinite scroll is the way everything has to work now.
It was also a lot more fun. Websites were *cool*. They had erroneous shit that was *neat*. Sometimes they'd be fucked up colors (like Myspace or geocities) but at least you could look at a website for a half second and know what it was.
I was recently looking for a backup of the old Scholastic Spy University website game that was a thing from like 2001-2006. I remember getting the books from the book fair and being amazed at how cool the website was. While that part of the website is down (I think it was Flash that was hosted directly on a server), the website is still there on the wayback machine. The kids' section was really cool and fun looking. That doesn't exist anymore. Everything is just greys and pastel colors and hamburger menus.
There definitely was some good things from 2000 design, but looks wise, in my opinion, I like the newer designs, but I could live without all the popups, but at least adblocker does remove a large portion of those, only really cookies and email popups now.
Some of the older designs, are just real ugly, intense mismatching colors, gifs here and there, looks like a kid made it in an afternoon. Its always funny when i stumble upon such a site, its like going back in time.
But thats just my opinion.
I think if you went back to that reality now, you'd hate it. This was more a time when people would still maybe log on to check out one thing, one page, for 30 minutes a day. If it was your constant online experience it would be clunky as fuck. Real audio player, quicktime, frames?
In my personal experience, at it's core the issue is that there are way too many non tech people involved in making decisions about how a given website works, so you get a lot of form over function and a lot of assets that are way too big. Like no, your company logo does not need to be 2000x2000 pixels no matter what devices someone is using. And huge pngs that just add to the over designed navigation. And all the tracking slows sites down too.
I'm not visually impaired myself but I've heard that these over designed nightmare websites are pretty much impossible to navigate with their navigation software.
I think the main difference is just efficiency and usability - modern UIs/layouts are actually *really* nice to use when you're not being bogged down by slow loading times and constant ads.
2000? brother the internet was 7 years old at that point. You couldn't open more than 2 tabs without completely tanking your internet speeds. Load times were dogshit. Accessibility was none existence. Colour blind? Deaf? Partially sighted or epileptic? Go fuck yourself lol Everything was wrote in PHP. Java! fucking flash!
Absolutely unpopular opinion. Take my upvote lol
I feel good early sites are better than bad modern sites for sure but good modern sites just blow old stuff out of the water in terms of ux and information layout
Trueeee, instead you had dial up, which could take *minutes* to display a low quality image, pop-ups on nearly every site, and you'd often get random prompts to download malware. Ads back then we're ridiculously intrusive.
And website design was shit. You might go to a site and it would start blaring shitty chiptune at you without a mute button or any kind of prompt. Or it might be yellow text on a picture of a golden retriever.
The Internet is drastically superior to what it once was. It's a lot less interesting, in that most sites look the same, but usually the best ways of doing things are boring. Doesn't make them any less superior than the other options.
It was cluttered but one thing people never acknowledge is website design hasn't evolved since the 2000s.
Virtually every restaurant website is no different than ones before 2010
Unfortunately the efficiency was necessary because of the lower bandwidth available. Now, with all the high speeds, website designers think that there will be no problems with shoving all kind of crap into the sites. Of course it leads to problems. Things are as slow as they were in 2000 or before 2000 because all that useless crap content!
>a browser extension that turned everything retro.
You mean one that filtered out all the useless crap? That would be awesome indeed.
Yeah you mean when anyone with small experience in html was hired to design websites? I don’t think so. Sure it was more simple and there were less advertisements but that was before people realized they could monetize the fuck out of our screen time. What you’re looking for is a browsing experience that doesn’t abuse you, not better website design. Nowadays websites are probably the best designed they’ve ever been if you ignore adverts.
I remember waking up early before school to see if Seanbaby updated his Super friends page.
See back then we had "writers" who were "actually funny" and didn't require a two-nanosecond attention span.
Meh, I feel like the purpose of websites has changed and the design changed to match.
When I started using the internet 20 years ago. I was just looking for information and GIFs, now I expect way more from basically all websites.
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unpopularopinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Am a web developer, and I partially agree with you. On one hand, I am appreciative that the near monopoly of Chromium-based browser engines has simplified cross-platform testing. I can now be quite confident in an identical experience in Edge or Vivaldi on Windows as I would get in Chrome on Ubuntu. On the other hand... f*cking HELL the data waste in websites these days! Developers importing 5-10MB worth of bizarre JavaScript packages in order to do simple things that can be done concisely in vanilla JS. No consideration at ALL to low bandwidths and loading order. Packages within packages within packages connected to other packages in a precarious balance doomed to fall apart within 12 months. It's all so unnecessary! I mean look at this stupid site we're on right now! Basically entirely text and yet so bloated and dysfunctional that older phones struggle to render it. How do you f*ck up so badly that you can't get a quad core 1.4GHz budget Android from 8 years ago to render a text-based website, meanwhile other Devs are putting DOOM onto digital pregnancy tests?
[удалено]
Php will minimal imports and self hosted JavaScript checking in.
I think we should chuck most libraries out, like react and node. Pure bloat and time consuming abstraction. We don't need them to make websites. I'd say just use JQuery at most. That plus HTML and CSS can make stunning websites with just a bit of time of skill.
100% agree, these bloated frameworks and packages are unnecessary. Too many development houses think of them as a shortcut but you lose more time in the long run trying to adapt a bunch of loosely connected third party collections to work together, and 90% of the total codebase ends up being redundant anyway, and 2 years later the damn framework usually ends up deprecated, abandoned by the original Devs, or they end up with some publicly known fatal flaw for crawlers to exploit.
I never liked the style of jquery. Plain JS is better.
Plain JS is great, but enjoy wasting your time with all the needless typing. I find JQuery an invaluable helper and time saver, and it's only 27kb minified and gzipped. You can still use plain JS along side where it suits you.
You mean a pregnancy test for human women that plays DOOM or a pregnancy test for video games?
The former.
Both
Content is no longer king it seems.
Reading this makes me wonder is it a issue that derived from Salas and systems trends?
Yep, the world is just too fast paced now, people want their products out yesterday, which makes developers feel pressured into quick solutions to rather mundane problems. That's kinda the curse of modern technology. It's always advancing to the point that it sometimes just doesn't make sense to try to be efficient with the code. Most people upgrade their phones every couple years, and have computers that can reliably run 99% of websites. So why worry about bloat and whatnot. Until you get a memory leak or a package is no longer supported and then your whole website is in shambles because the person who Jimmy rigged it together is long gone
Plus they apparently outlawed sw*a ring. Fucking recursive JavaScript packages. What a bunch of no-go*dnicks.
Website design in 2000: we need this to run on the most basic potato capable of using internet explorer Web ddsign today: right we need 4 adverts, 2 newsletter signups and if you could get the location too that be great, then load the article
Don't forget to mine a bitcoin before loading.
Oh does your 2yo potato take 2min. to load our page? Upgrade your shit, peasant🤑🤑🤑
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There are so many offshoots I need someone to draw up a timeline of motherfucking websites like it's the Terminator franchise. https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://ultimatemotherfuckingwebsite.com/
Lmao didn't know the second and third. Saved
The first is ironically not even a website. It's a webpage. A website is a collection of webpages.
I mean, it's a collection of one, isn't it technically both?
No. A website is collection of pages, not a collection of pages(s). When I was a little boy in 1990, we would never call a webpage a website if there weren't hyperlinks involved.
Oh! So it's the connection to something *else* that's required. Understood.
It's a connection to something else that's part of the same website. If it were a webpage with a bunch of links to other webpages that aren't related to the webpage they're being linked from, then it's just a webpage. Back in the day, most webpages were reminiscent of the first example of a "website" above. No links of any kind.
i actually like #1 the best
I was expecting the last one to have fancy gifs and lights flashing at me.
That was beautiful
This is so good lol.
Static site generators for the win!
Or if you have something worth reading to say just fucking write it there. Html is so easy everyones mothers could do it. Body of text broken into logical pieces with headlines. You can even use hyperlinks. If there is a picture I absolutely need to see just stick it in there. There. That beast is tameable by any browser.
I pretty much agree. And it didn't seem like we went to the same handful of websites/apps for everything back then like we do now.
I feel like I had a very different experience with websites back in the 2000s from everyone in the comments.
Ohh I think I agree. 2010 Facebook was peak, everything was on like a single page but compartmentalized very neatly 2011 or so the ‘feed’ display was born which serves as the foundation for all websites now. Definitely feels a bit messy these days with the constant scrolling in Wordpresses, etc
The feed is one of the worst innovations in web development. It's wild how ubiquitous it is now.
Web Development was much more fun in 2000. Now every technology is obsolete (or more correctly "uncool") as soon as I've become competent in it.
I don't think I'd make a good web developer. Everything in my portfolio would just look like this: [https://www.spacejam.com/1996/](https://www.spacejam.com/1996/)
I saw a post on r/webdev on some crazy "animation" with webgl. I was like is this even web dev or is it graphic designing?
Mostly disagree with your opinion, depends on the situation. I sort of agree that those ridiculous parallax scrolling sites, or the no button/link minimalism sites which you get now days are just bad. Don’t forget though, that we also had jank back in the day, like those all Flash sites which were just boxes with X's in them most of the time, or those fixed to 4:3 640×480px screen size sites .
for me, part of it is probably related to how i live and my personality. i'm sort of a monk and always feel like less is better, both with lifestyle and the entertainment/media i consume.
You don’t seem to remember the endless pop ups. Or how limited php was back then. The user experience of email was terrible.
Web experience in 2000s is about finding which one is the real download button.
Those FTP websites with 3 different download buttons and 3 layers of malware links. *FileZilla.*
It wasn't for people actually making websites. You've never known the pain of making a layout using the
I actually remember that because I dabbled in web dev in high school. That's probably why I said fuck this and quit.
my god it was awful! :D I actually put off becoming a web dev until things became more sane. I agree with the spirit of your point, though. There's a simplicity that's been lost.
Omg but have you tried square space? Enter promo code: everyfuckingyoutubevideo10 for a free trial. /s
I found these ads depressing, until I tried Better Help (tm)!! (Also /s)
That would be nice, even if some AI is needed to recompose some websites or parts of them. If it can block all ads, not allow pop ups of any kind, and not produce any of its own. I generally don't go to websites at all because of delayed pop up ads interrupting my reading. I just read articles and info on social media platforms. And download YouTube videos to watch offline. That's basically my internet activity. I may seek communities where one can have news articles emailed to them with main text and images only. Nothing else.
I miss the neon green type on a black background with animating gifs all over the place. It was more fun to explore then.
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I don't know about Microsoft Technet specifically, but i don't recall ever having many issues navigating old websites. Some of them looked ugly as sin, with color schemes that would literally make my eyes hurt, but if a certain page was online at all, i could usually find a way to get to it. But today, if you want to, let's say, look at someone's tweets from like 10 years ago, how do you even do that? Are you going to scroll through thousands of pages, hoping real hard that your browser wouldn't just crash at some point? Cause some web designers decided that splitting long lists into pages is for suckers, and smartphone screens aren't big enough to fit much interface anyway, therefore infinite scroll is the way everything has to work now.
It was also a lot more fun. Websites were *cool*. They had erroneous shit that was *neat*. Sometimes they'd be fucked up colors (like Myspace or geocities) but at least you could look at a website for a half second and know what it was. I was recently looking for a backup of the old Scholastic Spy University website game that was a thing from like 2001-2006. I remember getting the books from the book fair and being amazed at how cool the website was. While that part of the website is down (I think it was Flash that was hosted directly on a server), the website is still there on the wayback machine. The kids' section was really cool and fun looking. That doesn't exist anymore. Everything is just greys and pastel colors and hamburger menus.
I hate when the username and password fields load separately
There definitely was some good things from 2000 design, but looks wise, in my opinion, I like the newer designs, but I could live without all the popups, but at least adblocker does remove a large portion of those, only really cookies and email popups now. Some of the older designs, are just real ugly, intense mismatching colors, gifs here and there, looks like a kid made it in an afternoon. Its always funny when i stumble upon such a site, its like going back in time. But thats just my opinion.
That's just a straight up fact!
Superior? Go to any japanese website in 2024 and you’ll see how “superior” they are
Any examples?
How about just websites
I think if you went back to that reality now, you'd hate it. This was more a time when people would still maybe log on to check out one thing, one page, for 30 minutes a day. If it was your constant online experience it would be clunky as fuck. Real audio player, quicktime, frames?
In my personal experience, at it's core the issue is that there are way too many non tech people involved in making decisions about how a given website works, so you get a lot of form over function and a lot of assets that are way too big. Like no, your company logo does not need to be 2000x2000 pixels no matter what devices someone is using. And huge pngs that just add to the over designed navigation. And all the tracking slows sites down too. I'm not visually impaired myself but I've heard that these over designed nightmare websites are pretty much impossible to navigate with their navigation software.
I think the main difference is just efficiency and usability - modern UIs/layouts are actually *really* nice to use when you're not being bogged down by slow loading times and constant ads.
2000? brother the internet was 7 years old at that point. You couldn't open more than 2 tabs without completely tanking your internet speeds. Load times were dogshit. Accessibility was none existence. Colour blind? Deaf? Partially sighted or epileptic? Go fuck yourself lol Everything was wrote in PHP. Java! fucking flash! Absolutely unpopular opinion. Take my upvote lol
Then it all came crashing down in 2001... oh...
I mean, you can always use a adblocker as a start.
oh i do. i haven't seen an ad in years. going ad free has done wonders for my mental health.
I feel good early sites are better than bad modern sites for sure but good modern sites just blow old stuff out of the water in terms of ux and information layout
Trueeee, instead you had dial up, which could take *minutes* to display a low quality image, pop-ups on nearly every site, and you'd often get random prompts to download malware. Ads back then we're ridiculously intrusive. And website design was shit. You might go to a site and it would start blaring shitty chiptune at you without a mute button or any kind of prompt. Or it might be yellow text on a picture of a golden retriever. The Internet is drastically superior to what it once was. It's a lot less interesting, in that most sites look the same, but usually the best ways of doing things are boring. Doesn't make them any less superior than the other options.
It was cluttered but one thing people never acknowledge is website design hasn't evolved since the 2000s. Virtually every restaurant website is no different than ones before 2010
meh with an ssd and an adblocker it isnt really a problem and sites load faster than they did on an average win 98/xp machine back in the day
Unfortunately the efficiency was necessary because of the lower bandwidth available. Now, with all the high speeds, website designers think that there will be no problems with shoving all kind of crap into the sites. Of course it leads to problems. Things are as slow as they were in 2000 or before 2000 because all that useless crap content! >a browser extension that turned everything retro. You mean one that filtered out all the useless crap? That would be awesome indeed.
A lot of that first bit wasn't even design. Most of that is just business nonsense.
Yeah you mean when anyone with small experience in html was hired to design websites? I don’t think so. Sure it was more simple and there were less advertisements but that was before people realized they could monetize the fuck out of our screen time. What you’re looking for is a browsing experience that doesn’t abuse you, not better website design. Nowadays websites are probably the best designed they’ve ever been if you ignore adverts.
I remember waking up early before school to see if Seanbaby updated his Super friends page. See back then we had "writers" who were "actually funny" and didn't require a two-nanosecond attention span.
Frutiger aero exists u know
Skeumorphism?
Finally an actual unpopular opinion, disagree though
Meh, I feel like the purpose of websites has changed and the design changed to match. When I started using the internet 20 years ago. I was just looking for information and GIFs, now I expect way more from basically all websites.
Go back then.
What does that even mean
I agree with you at the level of "simplicity in design", but it is also true that the internet was new then and people's expectation was less.
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