The "old web" to me was GeoCities and Angelfire, it was customizing your NeoPets shop, it was hosting a web server on your home network on port 8080. It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later. It was webrings, banners, and websites reviewing and promoting other sites through a "links" section. It was right-clicking to copy an image and getting a Javascript alert telling you the image was "copyright". It was learning that you could copy it anyway if you spammed enter. It was hotlinking those same images in protest. It was waiting 5 hours to download a 37 second 320x240 RealPlayer video. It was having a password "protected" area where the password is base64 encoded in the source. It was trying the same search query in multiple search engines because they would return different results. It was typing random URLs in to see if you could find something interesting yourself. It was playing midi files on loop in the background. It was Macromedia Flash, explicit popups, pure yellow text on black backgrounds, and reformatting your computer to get rid of viruses.
The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today, maybe tomorrow it will be a Starbucks.
I run my own blog on AWS for ~a dollar a month.
The old web to me was mostly just not populated by people trying to make money off of it.
The whole transformation stems from there.
Yeah, I remember when searching and browsing the web meant finding tons of legit, information-dense content that had absolutely zero monetary interest behind it. Sites of university professors and students, random personal websites (countless band/game/movie/show fan sites), and even the company websites were usually quite sincere and simple. I feel VERY lucky to have been knee-deep in all of it since the beginning, certainly a unique time in the history of technology. Not sure when we'll see something like that again, if ever, since humanity cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
Here's a page containing mostly material from the 90's, lovingly preserved after the author's health eventually failed decades ago:
http://dogstar.dantimax.dk/theremin/index.htm
I can get lost for hours browsing sites like that on web.archive.org. Start from some interesting topic on ~1997 yahoo.com and follow links. A lot of dead links of course, since not everything is in the archive, but enough is there to make it more fun to read than almost anything easy to discover on www 2025.
For me, the old web died with filesharing. It was the point the legal and corporate world asserted control, truly a free place until then, anything felt possible.
I'd go as far as to say filesharing was a completely new, post-scarcity economic model. One that was ruthlessly crushed by capital.
It was also visiting pages like pages.small-isp.net/~username and digging through the HTML to see if somebody had <!-- hidden comments adding private commentary but only for folks who were knowledgeable and curious enough to look -->
This is the oldest snapshot I can find in archive.org, from 2001. But the page says copyright 1996 at the bottom, and that's more like when I actually published this page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010519112823/http://members.oz...
Sadly, or perhaps not, the Shockwave animation has failed to survive the internet geological record.
This bit made me grin:
N.B. this is an animation, but if you don't have netscape 2 or later with the shockwave plugin, you won't see it doing its stuff... You could try getting netscape 2 from netscape, and the plugin from macromedia if you really want
(Now I feel _old_, my regular internet username/handle is 30 years old next year...)
That link automatically downloads a CDR file.
I once bought a SNES game that couldn't be found at local stores (final fantasy 2) by 1/ finding a guy on a message board with the cartridge, 2/ mailing that person a check, and 3/ waiting (probably weeks?) to receive the cartridge in the mail. The old Internet. I still have that game btw.
For me, it was much easier to make friends with the manager of the local Blockbuster knock-off rental place and order games via them. Though I did once walk 6 miles (round trip) to Wal-Mart to buy Illusion of Gaia with allowance money.
It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold.
Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.
> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.
Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.
But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.
Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.
I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.
Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.
> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.
Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.
Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].
[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-b...
> Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.
Silverlight was a responsive to flash.
It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.
FWIW Google did support Flash on Android for a time.
Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.
Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features
I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.
There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.
> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.
From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]
Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.
This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.
We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.
Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.
Really?
Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.
I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706
>but Safari and Chrome have
Not on iOS. On iOS, it's all Safari, all the time, for every web browser app. Apple forbids any web browser engine other than Safari on iOS.
> It was always to obviously to make battery life better
I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.
> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.
That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)
Remember that iOS, unlike desktop operating systems, didn't have virtual memory and could only run one app at a time.
One app at a time means even less memory pressure. Plenty for flash!
Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jobs' personality, I think this is plausible.
We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.
Flash and open source actionscript allowed devs to completely circumvent the Apple App Store. That was a direct threat to the iOS business model at the time.
> Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash
Flash was never supported on iOS; Steve's letter was to confirm Apple wasn't ever going to support Flash on iOS; it remained available on MacOS.
I don't think the Photoshop thing had any affect on supporting Flash on iOS.
You're right, I did a quick search and apparently they still considered supporting it though [0], but they didn't they the results they were hoping for.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites...
Based
I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
Reminds me of https://poke-holo.simey.me/ note: hover over the cards to activate.
One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!
> now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol.
I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files).
> Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
YES.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly
That's exactly how I got into programming :)
Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant reason for having a website, we were already on the way to the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x the frequency.
Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.
StumbleUpon is the reason I regularly use the phrase, “I stumbled upon” to this day.
What a glorious product.
In retrospect, I would say that the "blog rush" was kind of a precursor to the rise of influencers. There was even a crowd of "blogging gurus" that would ask a pretty peny for advice on how to advance your blog.
The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6 funded project to have a blog besides its static website. At least with the influencing trend they don't ask researchers to do glamour shots with their food.
Ruffle needs more love. The time and effort that's gone in to a browser extension to emulate flash, should be receiving that sponsorship from Cloudflare.
https://ruffle.rs/
It's not just a browser extension -- it's also available as a JS library that can be added added to any site to restore seamless Flash support.
I'm waiting for microphone support so I can make the frog on Ze Frank's website sing.
It's more to do with HTML5 than lack-of flash, although it could be argued that flash's long-prophesied downfall was one of the reasons for HTML5's rapid adoption.
HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5 had no such pushback.
Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.
Apple killed Flash, Google killed RSS, both are killing the web and the PWA dream
More like PWA nightmare. PWAs are the final iteration of "you'll own nothing" when it comes to software.
That argument would have merit if the replacement wasn't apps, you can only buy in a monopoly store that own all the rights for licence management (and conveniently get deprecated at a pace decided by the company selling the hardware to run them).
Wow this hit too close to home but describes my internet experience of the 00s exactly. Except for anime vhs tapes it was fansubs on irc or mailing burned cds/dvds.
That's awesome. By the time I got on IRC it was for XDCC ;P. I did once pool cash with some friends to buy rips of Dragonball GT on ebay... 64 episodes on 2 CD-Rs.
>> The "old web" was McDonalds in the early 90's. This looks more like McDonalds today
McDonald's then vs. now: https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/1903891272496029709
Millenial gray.
>> It was mailing a check to an address you found on a website in hopes that you'd receive a bootleg anime VHS in the mail a few weeks later.
Check? More like actual dollar bills stuffed inside a piece of paper inside an envelope, so nobody could see what it was
This was a beautiful read.
Can I read your blog? Mine is https://blog.webb.page.
Very nice! Mine is https://ethanaa.com, but I basically only updated it for the first couple months after I built it lol.
Added to my NetNewsWire!
neocities.org for http is nice, gopher sphere is still a thing, Gemini is pretty cool. The old web is still around and pretty fun to surf. Recommend Lagrange.
> 8080
You mean 80. Ports after 1024 were for wimps.
Nah, port 8080 because your ISP is blocking port 80 to try and prevent you from running a home webserver.