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1996, It was magnificent in its simplicity. Very few walled gardens, no cookie-pop-ups, and very few ads.
And the best search engine was HotBot. Fight me.
It took until early 1998 before I got my own modem and could start to really enjoy it. For those of us who enjoyed "testing stuff with telnet", it was scary how much sensitive stuff was unencrypted and openly available. Anyone who knew how CGI worked could bypass a lot of stuff and craft custom headers to retrieve things they weren't supposed to.
The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren't really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.
But there were other usability quirks... I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn't have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn't resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox "prevent this site from showing this dialog" (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like
while (true) { alert('hello world'); }and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar,javascript:alert('hello world')would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn't default to search, it would only accept URLs.In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn't know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal... and he'd have to call a number, we'd look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother's house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:
Dogpile 4 life...
...dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly...
...how times have changed; i haven't used google for years...