I’d go back in a heartbeat. Making the web a software SDK was the worst thing to happen to it.

I wrote web pages in 1995. There was actually plenty you could do, but it was all server side driven.

And the ironic thing is you are chatting on a forum that could have easily been built in 1995.

I published my first website in 1995 (and while it wasn’t even a little popular, eventually a spammy gay porn site popped up with the exact same joke name, leading to a pretty odd early “what if you search for your own site” experience).

If you put 2026 media players (with modern bandwidth), on the manually curated small-editorial web of ‘95 it’d be amazing.

We used to have desktop apps, these SPA JS monstrosities are the result of MS missing the web then MS missing mobile. Instead of a desktop monopoly where ActiveX could pop up (providing better app experiences in many cases than one would think), we have cross-platform electron monstrosities and fat react apps that suck, are slow, and omfgbbq do they break. And suck. And eat up resources. Copy and paste breaks, scrolling breaks, nav gets hijacked, dark mode overridden.

Netflix, Spotify, MS have apps I see breaking on the regular on prime mainstream hardware. My modern gaming windows laptop, extra juicy GPU for all the LLM and local kubernetes admin, chokes on windows rendering. Windows isn’t just regressing, their entire stack is actively rotting, and all behind fancy web buttons.

Old man yelling at cloud, but: geeeez boys, I want to go back.

I’d go back. The BBS and dial up days look cosy

Now it’s owned by corporates and everyone is using bloated JS frameworks.

I would also go back in a heartbeat

You're not wrong but we've never really tried the combination of modern CSS with no JS. It could produce elegant designs that load really fast... or ad-filled slop but declarative.

> Did you use the web back in 1995?

I'm still not over the loss of Gopher.

I use a desktop mail client. I have always used desktop applications. I have never had any desire to use web mail clients. Likewise for office suite applications. A true desktop spreadsheet, word processor, and slide deck are always superior.

The web as an application platform has always been a half-baked, second class, inferior experience for the user. It has always been about developer convenience at the expense of the user. No thank you!

Somehow we have cross platform software today that isn't Electron slop. And shoehorning absolutely everything into what used to be a document oriented application, creating this grotesque mutant abomination we have today, has just moved the minefield. How many RCE's has Chromium had?

Also, up until Windows Vista, Microsoft thought that making every account on their OS root by default was an amazing idea, further exacerbating the problem you describe, which I don't deny existed. Software distribution on Windows is still a shit-show today, but I guess there's too much momentum to move to a Linux-style repository. The Microsoft Store is a piss poor attempt.

JavaScript didn’t kill Flash a Java. The web becoming cross platform did.

People started browsing on a plethora of devices from the Dreamcast to PDAs. And then Steve Jobs came a long and doubled down on the shift in accessibility. His stance on Flash was probably the only thing I agreed with him on too.

Oh, the social media was much, much better. People much more open, tracking didn't exist. All the idiots still thought computers were only a thing for nerds and kids.