I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.
Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#12I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception.
That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#13I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception. That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.
it's 3 products: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it?
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#14I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
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Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#15the prediction wasn't even wrong, it just split in two. deploying a static site in 2026 is genuinely easier than 1998. you drag a folder into netlify and you're done, no ISP instructions, no FTP client, no guy with a tarp. what exploded is everything before the deploy. and the funny thing is the actual complaint buried in this thread, "i don't want to paste my nav into every page and update it by hand," is the exact…
> react is, underneath everything, a really elaborate way to not repeat your navbar.
That specific use-case is now replaced by having a single, small webcomponent for client-side includes.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#16My experience was almost identical. Don’t forget all the time spent balancing image quality with load speed to get that perfect blend of shit quality and slow download.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#17I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#18I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
The original iPhone was genuinely terrible. A 2006 Nokia could surf the web on the go and tell you where you are. The iPhone could do neither, since Apple did not include a 3G modem or GPS. It also did not have any apps, and one of the key features highlighted by Steve Jobs was voicemail. The 3G one year later was the first truly usable iPhone.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#19I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
Very little of this rings true for me, but that part worst of all.
The mobile web pre-iPhone was terrible. Nobody used it, nobody wanted to use it, and nobody wanted to build it. At best there was a shitty cut back version on the `m` subdomain. WAP/WML were terrible and didn’t give you anything close to the real web, and XHTML Basic was still-born.
The iPhone came along with its “desktop class web browser” and it genuinely worked. Steve Jobs got on stage and told everybody if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should be web apps. Then he told everybody Flash was terrible – which it was – and that we should all use open standards instead.
Practically overnight, everybody commissioning websites wanted them to be “iPhone-compatible”. They did not ask for mobile sites – they specifically asked for them to be iPhone-compatible.
And because WebKit was open-source (thanks to it being based upon KHTML), all the other phone vendors took the code and ran with it, including Android.
This is why I say there is no single organisation that has done more to push the mobile web forward than Apple. The difference in attitudes and capability towards the mobile web changed practically overnight, and it’s directly attributable to Apple’s intentional actions to develop and promote the mobile web.
Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
#20I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower. My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
That might prove the novelty of the App Store back then. Also, let’s not forget that its’ screen was better than most other smartphones of its time. It was a rather limited phone, but not bad exactly.