this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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I miss the era where most pages didn't have ads.
Like 1986?
Because in the 90s population ads were REALLY bad. You'd open a page and 30 new windows would open up with ads, and closing each one caused 3 more to open, and you eventually just had to turn off the fucking computer.
And this was on dial-up, so they also destroyed your bandwidth.
I was browsing a manufacturers product website the other day, for a billion dollar company that makes industrial products.
Every page had fucking pop Up ads. Wtf!
When was that? I've been using the web for as long as it has been publicly available (1993), and I remember ads were always a thing. Hell, it used to be a lot worse.
In the 90s there were endless popup ads that would block the entire page, and used javascript exploits to literally move around the screen to avoid your mouse, so that you couldn't hit the close button. Not even killing the process worked cause they would just come right back the moment you closed them.
And don't forget about those sneaky pop-under ads that you wouldn't even notice until you were about to close your browser for the day. It's the reason why I was an early adopter of the original AdBlock when it first launched back in 2002 (I use Ublock Orgin and NextDNS these days.)
Ads aren't nearly as obnoxiously today as they were back then. At least the close button works. And they don't open in a new window anymore cause pop-up blockers are included in every browser now and have been for about 2 decades. And thankfully browsers have also disabled the ability for javascript to control window position and size.
I too started using the web back in summer of 93 NCSA What's New era. At that time, the idea was that if a company just put a web page up that was their ad, but the most exciting parts were people just putting up information for free. Link ads and banner ads started in 1994 but they weren't too bad. Pop-up ads started in 1997. They were pretty bad, but most browsers got popup blockers pretty quickly (especially Netscape Navigator iirc.) Adblock 0.1 was written in 2002 and the cat-and-mouse started. But generally the web was a great place to get information. Then the social media companies came forth with false gifts, speaking lies.
Most of those were actually malware that I stalled in your computer and infected the browser, not an actual ads.
Ads back then were mostly static banner ads that lived at the bottom of a website. They started getting worse in the early 2000s.
What were the ad blocking methods available? I didn't really use the Internet until early 2000s and I can't remember when I started using ad blocking extensions.
In the 90s? There weren't any. You just had to put up with it.
Wikipedia says the first Adblocker was released in 1996, but I never heard of it, nor did I know of anyone who was blocking ads back then. I didn't hear people discussing Adblockers until the mid-to-late 2000s, when AdBlock Plus first became popular.
I used ABP for many years until I learned that they sold out to the ad companies, and thus switched to Ublock Origin sometime in the 2010s. Not to mention that I got tired of having to manually update my ad filters. UBO made adblocking simple with its auto updater.
Yeah I meant the 90s Thanks, your timeline makes sense to me. I wonder if that ad blocker from 96 even did anything. I know they sold software that "doubled your ram" and other impossible things.