Anon does some online shopping : greentext

[–] Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works 227 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.”

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 69 points 1 week ago

This should be etched into gold as a perfect description of life in 2025.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 week ago

I read an interesting article about that: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ads/

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[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 41 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You missed scroll hijacking because reinventing how things move on the screen is important for some reason?

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[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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).

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[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] reptar@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Oh fuck them

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[–] Thorry84@feddit.nl 90 points 1 week ago (7 children)

And everything is SO FUCKING SLOW. I swear my old Celeron 300A at 500mhz running Windows 98 and SUSE Linux was super responsive. Everything you clicked just responded right away, everything felt smooth and snappy. Chatting with people over the internet using ICQ or MSN was basically instant, all the windows opened instantly, typing had zero latency and sending messages was instant.

My current Ryzen 5950X is not only a billion times faster, it also has 16 times the number of cores. I have hundreds of times the RAM as I had HDD capacity on that old system. Yet everything is slower, typing has latency, starting up Teams takes 5 minutes. Doing anything is slow, everything has latency and you need to wait for things to finish loading and rendering unless you want everything to mess up and you'd have to wait even more.

[–] nickhammes@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (2 children)

In the 90s, a lot of programmers spent a lot of time carefully optimizing everything, on the theory that every CPU cycle counted. And in the decades since, it's gotten easier than ever to write software, but the craft of writing great software has stalled compared to the ease of writing mediocre software. "Why shouldn't we block on a call to a remote service? Computers are so fast these days"

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.

The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it's now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.

Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.

There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.

The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.

Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros--rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape--would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn't happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.

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[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

Oh my fuck, my work has a website and I hate it. There are multiple fields to fill out on a page, and every time you fill one field, the entire page automatically refreshes. I can’t just tab from field to field and fill things out - I have to fill out a field, wait for the refresh, click in the next field, fill it out, wait for the refresh, click in the next field…. until I’m done.

Next, for some reason everything is a floating window and there is no scroll outside of it. Which means that if I click the page wrong, the floating window moves, and I can’t move it back. I lose all progress because the only way to fix it is to refresh the site.

Then there’s the speed. At the end of the day, when everyone is using this site, it gets extremely slow. You’d think this would be a predictable issue that the company could be proactive about, yet every day, right when we’re itching the most to go home, every one of us experiences the dreaded lag. I hadn’t seen lag this bad since I played Sims 2 on an old computer.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 17 points 1 week ago

"If you have resources, why shouldn't MY website be using 100% of it?" - web developers since 2017

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[–] A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world 86 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] decipher_jeanne@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah.... I tried that for a while. You don't go very far on modern internet with JS disabled

[–] emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 75 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And don't even get me started on payment.

[–] ChilledPeppers@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago

Based Brazil has pix: select payment method, scan qr code with your bank app, pay.

[–] Quik@infosec.pub 70 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You obviously also need an account for everything. This requirement is only communicated at checkout.

[–] relativestranger@feddit.nl 35 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 65 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Sad part about this is it's not comic hyperbole. It's just literally an average online experience.

[–] tungsten5@lemmy.zip 26 points 1 week ago (11 children)

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

[–] bob_lemon@feddit.org 11 points 1 week ago

Amazon redirecting you to the front page after you decline cookies is just amazingly stupid design.

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[–] green_copper@kbin.earth 62 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 43 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is the reason why I had a long and bloody fight regarding the homepage of the company I work at. And I won.

Management wanted a new homepage, marketing wanted the homepage to be - and this is a citation - "Emotional!!! And we want ENGAGEMENT!!!" (For context: We are building industrial machinery).

Marketing got an external offer (behind my back) and a mockup of the homepage based on React with animations and an dynamic background which turned every PC we looked at it with into a space heater. And they wanted to spend > 15 k € on it.

I - as something yanks would call a CTO - said no.

Everything turned quiet "Emotional!!!" for a couple of months, but in the end I won with the argument that we are building FUCKING BORING INDUSTRIAL MACHINERY, our costumers seldom change and if so, they are also from some big boring industrial company who already know us because we are in this business since Ugh, the first CEO chiseled the first iteration of our landmark product with a flintstone in 15000 BC.

The rebuild of the homepage resulted in something that is quiet nice looking... but that can also work perfectly fine in fucking DILLO!

[–] Tinidril@midwest.social 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Way back in 2001 when Adobe flash was the exciting new thing on the web, I was the network/firewall admin for the data-center hosting the company website. I didn't get to argue about the site itself, since they had Microsoft in to do that. I did win the argument against the Microsoft engineers wanting to put the site outside the firewall for "performance". Needless to say my ass was on the line if performance was impacted.

Sure enough, the big launch day arrives, the Superbowl adds run, and the complaints all start coming in about how terribly the site was performing. They beat the hell out of it in the lab, so they knew with absolute certainty that the firewall was to blame. Lots of higher-ups were suddenly aware that I existed, which is never a good thing for a network admin.

I dove into troubleshooting and had my answer in less than ten minutes. The front page was a monstrosity made entirely of flash that displayed nothing until the entire page loaded - graphics and all. That worked well enough on a high speed network but, back in 2001, most people at home were on dialup. A little quick math on the size of the download had it taking over 40 seconds to just see the front page.

The site got a really rapid rewrite, and I was off the hook.

[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 12 points 1 week ago

"Works fine in Dillo" is a golden endorsement.

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[–] Beryl@jlai.lu 39 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't toss your monitor, you will need to go to the online store in order to get a new one

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[–] axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

2025
Go to any website
uBlock Origin
No ads and cookie banners
Some AI chat assistant named Jill on the bottom right corner

[–] KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I always ask AI Jill if she wants to fuck.

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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 30 points 1 week ago

This is 100% accurate.

[–] happydoors@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Yeah, idk. 2005 internet sucked in a lot of ways too. Nostalgia doing a lot of work here

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[–] Gowron_Howard@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (3 children)

UX my ass. These “improvements” only hinder the user.

[–] currycourier@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

I suppose they never specified it was supposed to be a good user experience?

[–] Samskara@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The X stands for eXploitation.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

Our target audience is people with cognitive disabilities who still have access to a credit card.

[–] DicJacobus@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Rose tinted glasses. Shopping online in 2005 was absolutely not as simple as 3 clicks.

you missed the part about broken links, pages that wouldnt load because of some random HTML error, oh, and the payment itself either getting rejected or otherwise not working for a long time.

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[–] Dorkyd68@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Buying things online in 2005 was certainly better. Ebay was a wild place. You'd get in bidding wars going a dollar at a time. Sometimes you'd walk away with a pretty great deal. Not like now how you'll go to a garage sale and some dude wants retail for his 4 year golf clubs. That's in large part due to fb marketplace. It's straight ruined garage sale finds

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[–] gibmiser@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] sunglocto@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Use Librewolf + Ublock origin with cookie popups filter turned on and medium mode on when needed.

[–] VerilyFemme@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] Snowpix@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The fake chats all seem to use the exact same image too. Apparently this one woman works for dozens of support sites if you were to believe she was real in the first place.

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[–] sturger@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 week ago

2025 Got to Online Store Type "toilet paper" in search bar. Instead of simply saying, "Sorry, we have no toilet paper" they expect you to scroll through 50,000 variations of "toilet seats", "toilets", "toilet brushes", "paper", "paper toilets", "paper brushes" only to finally discover there are no entries for "toilet paper", etc. and discover for yourself that they have no toilet paper.

[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago

it is bad enough on some websites to make me wish I could just use a mail catalog thing

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