1999? I was ready to get off the web in 1999. How about surfing the web like it's 1994!
Or we could go back to 1991 with IRC, Archie+FTP, and Telnet BBS's on Wyse terminals or SparcStations. I'm very nostalgic for that era.
IMO Netscape 3.04g was the peak browser experience - and by far peak performance.
I remember when a friend who ran a business out of his basement got a T1 installed in 1997. Myself and several other friends were there the day Verizon hooked up the local loop. I did the first test on a desktop windows95 machine with Netscape 3. I typed "cnn.com", hit enter and BAM! the entire page loaded and rendered instantly before you could blink an eye. I fell out of my chair. On dialup it would take about almost a minute to download all the images.
Once Netscape 4 hit it was a slow downhill path of bloat. I have not been able to replicate that instant rendering experience since then.
Now I teach those courses at the same university. Those terminals are long gone. This week we had a coding exam and students were coding with their laptops. They are forbidden from checking the Internet, sharing folders, and using AI assistance, but I'm sure some of them did because it's impossible to watch their every move. The exam would be fairer if we still had the Wyse terminals!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...