Oof, what? Toolbars were painfully visible, but spam extensions are just as common today. The difference is that today you can get them straight from the comfort of the top search result for any innocuous term.

The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been. And getting your spam code installed is super easy, barely an inconvenience.

> The web today, without an ad blocker, is just as land-mined as it’s always been.

No dude. From this comment I would say that you're either too young to have living the toolbars that parents is mentioning, or too in your own bubble to know the kind of people who would fall for it.

Anyone else remember having their mom's boyfriend getting you to remove the animated porn lady walking on top of the windows bar while explaining that he had no idea how that got there?

VirtuaGirl.

I made a good chunk of money in my small town being the computer repair guy (well, kid).

Just you referring to that blight brought up memories of my entire digital youth. Having my parents shepherd my and my PC to friends so we could LAN, Hamachi (virtual LAN), Kazaa, Limewire / Frostwire, Azareus / uTorrent, uHARC compressed games, jailbreaking iPhones, writing my own hooks for d3dx9.dll for cheating on games.. good times.

Specifically with Azareus vs. uTorrent I remember being amazed how a program that was a few hundred kilobytes could principally do the same thing as one that was a few hundred megabytes big, and with 1/10th of the RAM consumption to boot. It’s given me a lifelong impression of Java being a sluggish crappy language, which isn’t factually correct.. but first impressions last.

Strangely enough I have a feeling we (‘90s kids) were the last generation where every kid had to learn at least some digital nimbleness. These days even the cracks and jailbreaks are one-click and work without a fault.

The cracks back then were packaged into almost a single click too, along with some great music. The site seems to be gone now, but keygenmusic.net had been a great archive.

https://archive.is/MeJP5

The music was always too loud to appreciate. Nothing caused me to throw my headphones off more.

You've made me remember doing the same, thanks. Damn were those brutally abrupt.

Gamecopyworld is still a thing and still the same great interface and ad riddled mess.

Hamachi, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

I'm going to guess you're in your early- to mid-30's.

It stuck around for a good long while, fortunately; I recall using it to run a Minecraft server for my friends as late as 2012 or so.

I still use it!

I think azureus is a few years too new, but the earliest versions of java didn't include a jit and were only interpreted, so it really was rather slow.

starting digital life on Parental Control AOL with only keywords

true hardmode

So many blank discs to tape over and save things on in the mailbox. Then the unlimited supply of coasters following.

I knew a guy that had a free trial of AOL for 5 plus years because he's call and threaten to cancel his service - which eventually turned into "listen, Ive been with you folks for 3 plus years now, and I'd really hate to cancel my service now but..."

Bam, another free 6 month window. I still find it hilarious.

Who else rocked qlink ? We're getting there now...

…and then it reappears the next week? Yes.

Where I live moms have husbands, not boyfriends.

I don't know if you realize this, but moms are actually people, and can exist in all sorts of situations. Go figure.

I think it kinda evens out because while the web is better, more people are using it.

If I look at just the experience I've had these last 20 years I'd say nothing has changed overall.

Because my mom got her Samsung phone infected from official Google ads. And who do you report that to? They don't care. If she didn't have someone who could identify she had a malicious program and reset her phone she'd just live her life with constant ads popping up randomly.

VirtuaGirl wasn’t nearly as bad as that quiet extension mining bitcoins and syphoning your dad’s passwords in the background.

Flashy != dangerous.

Heck today viruses don’t even limit themselves to restarting your computer, they encrypt your files and blackmail entire hospitals.

So yeah no, things did not get better at all.

Extensions are potentially worse - they can be quite hidden while still doing naughty things to your browsing history or even the pages you visit.

That's what toolbars did.

and toolbars are not sandboxed.

Back in those days, nothing (except java) in the browser is sandboxed.

Oh you think that all "toolbars" are visible. That's so endearing.

This thread really needs pictures. https://www.wintips.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image_thu... is what you'd come home from college to find on the family computer. Getting ads on individual pages is limited to that site. Those dual search bars are slurping up every web request and sending it on to its master.

That's if you were lucky. You could also come home to this: https://imgur.io/X7ipc?r

where's the scream emoji when you need it?

the other thing to note is just how spoiled we are with monitors these days. $400 for a giant fat pile of screen real estate, on something the thickness of a book (adjust the kind of book for the kind of monitor you have). Back in days of yore, monitors were CRTs. Deep and heavy, and with poor resolution. it's only recently we've been able to get exquisite 4k (or higher!) monitors, which meant that losing any screen real estate hurt plenty.

> super easy, barely an inconvenience

Wow wow wow wow wow wow. I see we have another Ryan George fan here.

It seems to me that few people today actually use extensions. They're hard to find in browsers (in Chrome you need to go through several clicks) and have warnings installing them. I'm always surprised to find that many non-technical people I know don't use any extensions at all. But that's probably intended, Google doesn't seem to like them anyway (esp Adblock).

Smartphones are the modern dark patterns and are far worse than IE era toolbars. The toolbars and other Windows crap were easy to notice and easy to get rid off. The modern smartphone is a fast, sleek and utterly locked down device which collects a firehose of your personal data without ever giving any indication that it is harming you. Out of sight, out of mind.

Easy to get rid of? I remember a monkey one that was harder to cure than aids.

Anyone remember that?

Bonzi Buddy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

no but I remember going in to these Windows registry files and removing things in an exact order like a bomb.

So many installers for windows software tried to sneak the yandex toolbar past people clicking "next" without looking, it became a meme.

I remember Oracle sneaking the Ask toolbar into the JRE installer. Meanwhile the JDK installer (which also installs JRE) has no toolbar. Clearly preying on people who aren't developers. True scum.

Tragically, Microsoft has looked back and realized that people will put up with a lot of shit, so they decided to implement about 20% of it themselves.

I recall some of them requiring editing registry, or using software like CCleaner. Far from easy in my opinion, especially for a layperson.