Yes, clearly the web was better when half the sites were broken because you didn't have the latest version of Flash/Shockwave/Java and the entire website just showed a sad rectangle.

There's nostalgia and then there's outright denial. The reason you think the web was glorious in 2006 is that you forgot everything that was shit about it.

Want to know what made those shitty parts go away?

Modern JavaScript.

2006 is maybe not the correct year, but I'd say the was a period around JQuery's heyday that had a lot of advantages compared to today. JavaScript, while used frequently, was mostly for progressive enhancement, CSS was beggining to be a saner language to work with (particularly with sass), and overall, I generally felt more productive than I do today in the JS-driven world of the web.

Absolutely there's a class of applications that wouldn't be possible with this approach, and I'm glad they exist. But it seems the "correct" answer to any problem to be solved on the web, no matter how straightforward, is to reach for React or a similar framework.

Java was irrelevant by then, shockwave was not really used for websites, that would be Flash, which was already installed on most clients and was working fine.

Flash was not shitty, it was quite good for writing apps, but it was proprietary and like a lot of contemporary tech it was (becoming) a security liability.

You're giving waaay too much credit to JS. Apple almost single-handedly buried Flash.

Modern JavaScript is just as bad as Flash, Shockwave & Java; indeed, it's worse: those plugins could be enabled or disabled within particular pages and everything else would continue to work just fine, but modern SPAs are utterly unusable without JavaScript. Modern web sites use JavaScript to insert text & images into the DOM; it's impossible to usefully view the web without a full-fledged JavaScript implementation. It's impossible to read a blog without exposing yourself to security & privacy risks due to JavaScript.

It used to be possible to escape; now it no longer is.

> Want to know what made those shitty parts go away?

> Modern JavaScript.

Modern JavaScript didn't make the shitty parts go away; modern JavaScript made the shitty parts universal.

> As far as benefits to the users are concerned, why is today's web better?

It does more. Significantly more than "back in the day".

It does more or less what Flash did back then. Probably less.

JS is nicer because it's a standard and it's supported everywhere.

It seems to me that modern JS and CSS are mostly used to make much-worse-performing and even-more-annoying replacements for frames, and a plague of worse-than-ever popups. :-/

I, for one, like webmail and don't pine for the days before Oddpost/Gmail and AJAX in general.

I mean, there was webmail back then... Besides a prettier interface and hitting refresh to check for new messages, there's no substantive difference.

You're excluding exactly what I suspect OP considers a substantive difference.

Yes, exactly:

"Besides this major technical difference, there is basically no major technical difference" :)