With dial up, it felt like it was working. It was trying its best.
Now it feels like it's bogged down with ads and tracking and bots.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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or billions of redirects. I am looking at you, SAP.
I concur
Jesus doesn't, therefore this is not consensusual
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Dial up was offering you something you might not have ever seen before.
Not loading your page full of ads while you try to pay a utility bill.
Ads? What are they?
Back then if it took more then that to load it was because you picked on a piece of media not the homepage.
Nowadays it's them making you download 300MB of JS so they can make images rotate in a gallery.
/300MB of trackers
Yea JavaScript.
Afterwards they let you pick which of them they should run, ignore your choice, upload your drive to Google and install a crypto miner.
Remember early 2000s when one of the metrics to be a good website was how many milliseconds it took to load?
If your site had 120ms of overhead, it wasn't professional.
Absolutely. I remember when Google Chrome started to be a thing, they had an actual video ad showing that it could load and render the Google homepage in like 100 ms. And so we all switched from Firefox, which had become large and bloated.
Now Chrome is full of a ton of useless crap, most web pages are painful without ad blockers, and there is pretty much zero effort put into efficient web design.
I moved back to Firefox soon after, and after the ad blocker ban I'm glad I made the switch back then
Pepperidge Farms remembers!
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Ironic
Nowadays I ragequit every site that doesn't have a "reject all cookies" option.
Part of good website design back then was to set up the webpage so it shows the structure first, then fills in over the rest of the time, and also why interlacing was used a lot for images, so you could see the image gradually form over the load time vs. top to bottom or nothing at all until the end.
If you're really old enough, you remember being able to read the BBS text as it came in.
I mean this is true of MPAs that care about load times as well. Use server side rendering to send the initial HTML structure and then load only the JS that’s needed to interact with the current page state.
Because most dial up website pages took 5 seconds or less to load.
I found one of the most graphic heavy websites from 1998, sttng.com and it was 50KB. That's 10 seconds to load on a 56kbs modem (you'd never actually get 56kbs).
My grandparents still had dialup in the 2010s. I can remember in the early 2000s waiting 20-30 minutes for a Strong Bad Email to start playing so I could show my cousins.
Flash is what really changed things.
There was a noticeably bigger lag if it was across an ocean.
I mean 56/8 = 7 kB/s, 50/7 = 7.x, just add a bit of latency here and there, not really a surprise if it takes 10 seconds
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The fun thing here is that pages actually loaded faster back then when internet access was via modem.
If you analyze a modern web page, e.g. an article from a newspaper, you usually download 20, 50, or even more megabytes in total: frameworks, tracking, and, worst of all, advertizing. All for maybe 2 kilobytes of text, and maybe 50 kilobytes of article-related picture.
All that junk did not exist back then. You only got a logo, and maybe the name of the paper as b&w image resembling the printed version, and a line of links for navigation as the only overhead. And the logo and title would be in the cache after the first load, and would be reused everywhere on the site without reloading from the net.
Yup, it all exists to create employment because we still have an economic model that was around since we burned wood.
If you’re that old, you earned instant webpage load times.
Websites using 'tech stacks' and AWS services to serve up what should be static html is the crime of the decade.
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I remember when we were told every millisecond made sites lose users, and nowadays they download an entire OS worth of spyware without consequences. So we are going back to dial up load times soon enough.
What do you mean soon?
Modern websites are bloated trash, so many advertisements and trackers and stupid JavaScript packages to build a shitty UI full of unnecessary animations and shit that adds nothing
Feels the contrary as a frontend dev. Young ppl can stand with weird web design and carefully find out where to click in like GitHub or Gmail but old fella rage quit unfriendly desktop GUIs.
dude....same. I have ZERO chill for shitty UI design.
hide the menu automatically? fuck you.
hide the logout link? fuck you.
block access to ctrl+c? extra fuck you.
there's a special place in hell for product owners and shitty frontend devs right between Nazis and rapist clowns.
Personally, I think a bigger "fuck you" to the browsers that implement parts of standards that give websites more control than users (regarding blocking usual actions). Like with websites, I kinda get it; they don't want you to do something you normally can do for whatever reasons. But when the browser goes along with it, it is a betrayal because the browser was supposed to be on my side, not some asshole web dev's.
If it takes 5 seconds to load the website it’s not going to finish. That’s usually an issue at the other end of the intertube.
Or Cloudflare being Cloudflare.
i am going to crash out if ONE more website with an average of 4 monthly users puts on cloudflare "Under Attack Mode" and makes me sit through 15 seconds of verification before I can view their stupid webpage
Which is why net neutrality is such a big issue. And, why the billionaires don't want it:
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5247840/net-neutrality-fcc-struck
Because we don't have dial-up anymore, so if it takes that long it's because someone made a shit website. See: every newspaper site that is like two paragraphs of text interspersed with 15 skyscraper listicle ads.
When an image is hosted by someone using quokk.au, this happens to me. I don't know what it is, but something about that instance just won't load sometimes.
Just use curl ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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