Perhaps like me some of you recall what browsing the web was like in the '90s. Perhaps you did not exist yet - now that's a scary concept, eh? That life was here and we all lived and partied before you even took your first breath, but believe me, there was the Internet before many of today's cell touting zombies knew how to tap. When we tapped on a thin piece of glass as children, in reality nothing happened, but in our minds we were stepping through other dimensions. And yet with all of our tapping today, the pot holes even in cities like Toronto remain unfilled and in disarray. Graffiti still liters our urban cores and people still beg for change. It seems all this feminism and macho love and tech movements achieved, well, very much in terms of entertainment, but not much else.
All that aside, let me explain what the web was like. I'd type in a URL, that's a web address for you kids, and a website would load. It would take two minutes as the ISPs were way slower. But once it started to render, to display in the then current and modern Netscape browser, it was readable. Unlike today, there was not ads everywhere. The page didn't show me the text, and when I started reading after the first few words, it did not redraw the passages and reformat and reflow around the late loading ads forcing me to lose my place and find the words again. Only then to read another phrase and then the ads at the top and bottom would reformulate the page a third time forcing me to scroll up as the words would scroll below where I was by that point. This is the experience in the latest Firefox 59 on both Ubuntu 18 and Windows 8 as well as on Mac OS High Sierra. Sure we have megabit downloads, and we have quad-core and better processors. But the experience is lost. Now reading is fun only if I let the page load and I close my eyes and sip coffee and wait a full minute or two for all the widgets, plugins and such to do their work, and then the text is there. This is not how the web should ever, ever, ever, in our worst nightmares, have worked. Mr. Lee never wanted us to pay by the byte and not be able to decide what we are paying for. I pay for my bandwidth and the ads are forced upon me by each site, thereby taking actual physical currency from me with each site visit. The money does not even go to the advertisers but to my ISP. The actual pages I happen to read are mostly text-based journals and articles on various subjects. Thus the content consumes far less bandwidth than the ads. Many web sites blast the visitor with auto-playing video, and that eats up bandwidth quite more dramatically than the written words that I am communicating these ideas with. Since I pay per bit coming through the wires, it means as I said, all that video in ads and on FB costs me money, and not you. That is unfair, unjust, and should never be allowed by any legal system.
Now a further nuisance has emerged - cookies. Sites started tracking us all via cookies. I recall before they existed, and the reason for their existence, and learning how to deploy them via code which did not yet have libraries available written by others. Reading RFCs, protocol standards, and sending cookie data and receiving it with basic Perl code was a lot of fun. But then came big business, and zombie culture. Now one site uses cookies from a third-party and correlates it with an ad on an unrelated site in tandem with BigData analytics to track how one geographically dissimilar set of people shop uniquely from another racial section in another continent. And so the browser Gods fought back with a "Do Not Track" button. Even Microsoft got on the bandwagon and I believe set it by default to not track, a first for the tech industry. This is all fine and dandy, but if most people are going to leave it set to not track, then what is the point? But they went even further, so now every website upon loading bombards us with a "This website uses cookies" policy notice. It ruins the look of sites, sits on top, sometimes hovers, sometimes is brightly lit like a construction site, and it totally destroys an otherwise beautiful browsing experience. Imagine your husband or wife before sex wearing a giant neon tag that says "might break your heart or contain STDs". How fun would that experience be? Sure it's the truth, but it's also not the point. The "site has cookies" notice is annoying at best and quite useless if you think about it. Ask many people what a cookie is and what it does and they have no idea. Most people just waste clicks and time with that option's closing little x button and move on, never quite grasping what it is nor what it does let alone what they're supposed to learn from it.
So my solution that I think many have thought of is simple. Let's have a browser centric Notification and Distractions Option, kinda like a "Do Not Track" button. If it's checked, these notices never appear in the website, but go to a notifications pane of the browser, where I may at my leisure be informed if I so choose. Kinda like a new email notification, without the email popping up in the middle of the desktop. If I visit IBM's website, instead of the "We have cookies that you can not eat" notice at the top of their otherwise beautifully designed Smarter Planet website, a little flag appears on the browser's notification pane and I know if I wish to I can read what IBM wants me to know. Otherwise I go on about reading their latest OS/2-like tech-ruining master plans about CogSci and it's oh-so-wonderful benefits for humanity. How come these tech giants never list the down sides of tech on their fancy sites, eh? Talk about a biased opinion. Personally I think this suggestion makes a lot of sense and I am surprised it has not become the norm so far. After nearly three decades of browser development I do not grasp why nothing has truly changed in this way but all this other not-so-good things from the real world entered the code. Instead of faster loading times, we have graffitied our bandwidth with ads. Thanks, but no thanks. I want my Netscape back!
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