rnd

All the pop-up blocking that old web browsers had is still a thing. It’s just that most websites no longer make their pop-ups as separate browser windows that pop up via timed script, because that’s easily detectable and blockable.

Nowadays, they’ll form a pop-up using additional fixed-position <div>s, or form what’s functionally a redirect by creating what, to the web browser, looks like a giant link that opens up in a separate tab, or do other sneakier techniques, which are much harder to definitively detect as “a pop-up” and block without causing legitimate web pages to break.

As the web is becoming more and more a platform for full-on applications, you can’t really determine which functionality will only be used by ads or malware. There are projects like Gemini, which deliberately aim for a minimalist set of features that can only be used to deliver simple content with no intrusive additions, but these won’t serve as a complete replacement for the web.

Yeah, that was a pretty neat thing. I remember looking through the .cab files from the Windows 95 installation disks and seeing files that didn’t belong in Windows 95 itself. There was even a version of the “Cardfile” utility, a simplistic data organizer that was part of Windows 3.x, but not 95.