I remember using Lynx as a daily driver 30 years ago. It was fast, and barely had any compatibility issues because HTML that time was simpler. I remember using it as a daily driver. A GUI browser would be handy with image-heavy web sites, but those would take ages to load anyway.
It seems like Lynx failed to guide new standards, and that hindered the development of web in a text-compatible way. So, we ended up with this where Lynx is probably not usable at all today.
It would have been a net win for accessibility too if we always had Lynx et al in our sights.
It’s astonishing to me that Microsoft is letting go of all these users because someone drew something on whiteboard that looked like “force Microsoft Account on all users -> ??? -> Profit”, and has repeatedly done the same with Teams, Ads, Bing, OneDrive, use of WebView in essential components etc.
I’m not only saying that as a former Windows engineer, but as someone who actively uses Windows, OneDrive, Office, etc. Microsoft is hurting their userbase and that’s not a winning strategy in the long term.
But I’m sure some exec will eventually justify Windows’ decline caused by these thousand cuts as “inevitable outcome of macro-level changes in technological trends” or whatever.
Curious to understand what drove that the most?
Certainly for this article, Medium's annoying way it blocks zooming in/out on images when on mobile is limiting and frustrating! But I sense you'll have broader concerns...
The way Medium used my non-monetized account as a subscription/registration trampoline. I was basically always behind a registration/pay wall against my wishes.
One of my favorite Firefox bugs was some I don’t quite remember the details of, but went something like this:
“There’s a crash while using this config file.” Something more complex than that, but ultimately a crash of some kind.
Years later, like 20 years later, the bug was closed. You see, they re-wrote the config parser in Rust, and now this is fixed.”
That’s cool but it’s not the part I remember. The part I always think about is, imagine responding to the bug right after it was opened with “sorry, we need to go off and write our own programming language before this bug is fixed. Don’t worry, we’ll be back, it’s just gonna take some time.”
Nobody would believe you. But yet, it’s what happened.
I used to play Aardwolf almost 27 years ago when its address was wolf.mudservices.com 4000.
It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.
I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.
My first MUD I ran was there on mudservices! I learned C and become a programmer because of MUDs. MUDs and my obsession with building them in high school took me on a very long and statistically improbable journey of success in my career and life.
This reminds me that back in high school, I would multibox on the MUD I played regularly by logging in, pulling the plug on my dial-up modem, dialing back in and then logging back in to my initial character and a new one. Dialing in would give me a fresh IP address, but the initially logged-in character would retain the one it logged in with (also, you had to do this fast enough that the character didn't get disconnected).
I also had some scumbag moments. Namely, I helped someone else on the MUD code on his other MUD, and I saw that he never installed libcrypt or whatever, so I could view players' passwords in plaintext. Since I new him from the main MUD we played, there were a bunch of people I knew playing in both, at least to check out this guy's project. So I'd use the same IP trick to log in as them and kill their friends, as them. Fun stuff.
I once ran multiple bots on Ancient Anguish that would do simple quests for cash and follow other player to steal their gear if they dropped anything. The bots would then find my main and hand everything over.
The mods teleported my chars into a dungeon and virtually tortured them while trying to get me to admit one person was behind the lot.
reply