Things we don't have to worry about anymore:

10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...

Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.

Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.

Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.

Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...

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dmantis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.

Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.

Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.

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ramijames 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!

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anthk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Win 98 was 32 bit but half-an OS, NT and GNU/Linux were far better.

- Terrible streaming.

WMA files too.

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DavidPiper 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

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bluedino 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'

In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.

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glaslong 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right? The 2000-2010s saw a massive rejection of popups. Blockers became common. Best practices emerged that avoided them like the plague. I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop.

Now popups are fully back as login, sign up, cookie and deal spam. We've actively regressed on this front back to "pop-ups everywhere!"

	▲	vaylian 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop. I hate modals even more than pop-ups. There are valid reasons to use either, but in most cases they are a form of abuse.