A crummy history of ads on the internet:

Starts out mostly used in formal fields and universities. Very usable!

Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation, leading to scammers and popup hell duw to misuse of a feature.

Ad blockers start to reign in that shit, and the better browsers kill the popup infestation at the source. Pretty darn usable at this point, except for internet explorer.

Google, an ad company, decides to make a browser so they can do all the malicious advertising and tracking on the backend.

uBlock Origin is too effective at blocking the browser based tracking and advertising so google decided to do the manifest 3 or whatever that bullshit is called to openly force ads onto users.

Based on history, I expect chrome to die a slow death due to the backlash from the manifest crap, but could be wrong since people are apparently fine with ads being forced into streaming services.

pop-up ads? Ha... try pop-UNDER ads.

also can't have ads when there is no javascript to begin with. Just static content.

Not to mention the internet wasn't as secure as it is now. There was lots of malicious code everywhere. Oh, and if you write a typo in any website's name there was a 50/50 chance you'll be redirected to porn.

I think this entire response thread is too young. Back when you connected to the Internet with 14.4k and 28k modems (mid to late 90's), websites were as OP described. Simply put, there was no bandwidth for too much extra crap.

Came here to say this. They make a joke about how many adds are on the Internet in an episode of Futurama that aired in 2000.

Sure, but we had Bonzi Buddy too. These days the best we can hope for is some AI that tells us to eat rocks.

noice

Yeah that's not how I remember the early Internet.
More like gifs everywhere, wild colours, you have to have that fancy html marquee! And terrible layouts, because aligning divs is difficult.
Good times

I remember clicking on a website and getting ABSOLUTELY BOMBSRDED WITH NEVERENDING POPUPS OF HARDCORE PORN PICS AND SOUND and my parents were behind me, and you just panic reboot the computer.

Ah yes. Before the dark times. When dragons lay sleeping.

Yep. That's the ones. Or really pornographic or absurd. Cause buying more makes you feel like you have control of your life when you can buy a new shirt that dissolves when you wash it because you can't afford to take a day off to walk around a park.

"Shop like a billionaire"

"Uh, ok"

closes Temu app, calls Sotheby's