Now it's totally OK to break all that with AJAX and "text-as-apps"... I much prefer the days of the old web.
e.g. you click a link in your email and it takes you to "www.foo.com/somethingWithParametersAndImportantStuff", foo.com detects you're on a phone and redirects you to their mobile homepage at "m.foo.com", blowing away your URL or even better not supporting your particular URL's page in the mobile site... where... your mobile browser could've just rendered the original site, albeit pinched.
It comes to mind because I'm currently dealing with this as an issue with UPS.com. We're halfway to 2017, people! How can we be having these problems.... :-)
Anyone know where I can find publication dates for individual comics? I don't see anything on the comic's page.
Flash never really was a problem for me; very very few used it for anything critical. It was mostly for entertainment and media that has no value for me. I lived just fine with no flash installed, and got performance & security benefits for simply not having it. Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now.
And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either. On one hand it was mostly fanboyism. On the other, web designers using some niche feature that had no real impact on functionality or my ability to read & navigate the content. Again, I don't recall ever having to switch to another browser because of that. So it really was better for me back in the day.
Actually there was a period (end of the 90s, early 2000s) where flash was pervasively used to build entire sites. They were worse than single pages app of today. Completely broke browser history, urls etc... Those are similar complaints to today but now that APIs and workaround exit, it's mostly laziness that prevent people from properly building apps that avoid these pitfalls.
"And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either".
There were days where not having a windows machine with IE installed meant not being able to bank online, access university course website etc... This is no longer an issue that I run into much in 2016.
"Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now."
That used to be the case too with Flash (and java to a smaller extent). Without flash many many sites were completely broken. This obviously got better with time to the point where it's hard to remember but it was pretty horrible to try to use the web without flash circa 2000-2006 or so.
I get that some want JS disabled but it's the only cross browser method of achieving certain interactive experiences on the web. It's not new technology and has been around since the earliest days of the web. The percentage of people with JS disabled is so low (less than 1% in sites on many sites I've dealt with) that it was very hard to justify the added effort to support both (in the case of the sites I worked on, they were large enough that the effort was made). As the web becomes used for more and more use cases, it's going to be hard to keep accommodating a very small minority of users. If JS wasn't there, something else would have to exist to do what it does.
That's a pretty low bar.
We have "best viewed in Chrome" today, which is no different.
A crappy, lazy developer won't care about state history. A good developer will. You can do things right if you want to. It's more work but not a huge amount more.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API...
Just as a pointer, using this "portmanteau as diss" discourse style is generally a bad idea if you want to be persuasive to people who aren't sure yet whether or not they agree with you, rather than just "preaching to the choir" who already share your views. The rest of your comment made some decent points, but name-calling like this just comes off as childish.
