I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.

Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.

It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.

Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.