I remember those days. Back then I'd say 99.97% of those horrible ads you describe were on spam / bad websites. The normal, good sites that we went to every day had very, very tame ads. For the most part, as long as you visited reputable sites back then, the ads were not a big deal.

Today the reputable sites are an absolute mess with huge, bloated and completely unusable ads. So yes the ads back then on non-reputable sites were worse because of what the browser makers allowed websites to do but when you compare the reputable websites? There is no contest that today is far, far worse.

Remember pop-unders? I don't miss closing my browser and finding a dozen ads hiding under the window.

Of course in that time you had no tab indicator to nicely tell you who was playing sound.

Nothing quite like those search that took you on sketchy websites and their porn pop under blasting orgasmic noises in your home / office while you frantically try to find who does that (and then close everything because it's taking too long).

"The good old time", as they say.

Sound indicators ... that time? Like a year ago?

I understand your jest, but for reference by "that time" I referred to back when pop under were still a thing.

Searching for which tab makes sound is one thing, searching for it and not finding it anywhere because it's a pop under positioned at the bottom right of your screen is a whole other experience.

I was there, and I only started using ad blockers a couple of years ago. It is much, much, much worse now.

Different opinions then I guess.

I prefer a (collection of) ads that obfuscate the entire page I'm trying to read but doesn't bother me while I look at something else and happily let me close and go away than something that makes everything a hog and crash my browser randomly while I might not even see it because it's five tabs away in the footer of some website.

Ads were terrible, they continue to be terrible, they used to and still do provide most of the money needed to run sites, and it's still hard to get users to pay for content like articles on the internet. We still haven't solved these fundamental problems with funding quality content on the web. There are models that kinda work, but ads sadly seem to work the best in terms of giving everyone access "without paying", even though you're paying with your privacy, time, and eyeballs. Many people prefer this vs something like paywall games or subscription-only services.

I subscribe to a lot of sites and newspapers and they still show me their ads.