you ever just want to yell stop it at your web browser when it's acting up
well there's actually a button that's supposed to get the browser to do exactly that the stop button but if
you've only ever used modern browsers you might not even really have noticed
it it's typically a little x that occupies around the same space as the
refresh button and disappears once the page is finished loading but the stop
button is far from a modern invention in fact it was included in both internet
explorer 1.0 and netscape navigator 1.0
and it was really important back then the stop button did pretty much what it
does now stopped the web page from loading but why exactly would you want
that if you clicked on the link to begin with well back in the old days we were
all using those painfully slow 28 or 56k
if you were lucky dial up connections meaning that web pages took a long time
to load and although plain text often loaded fairly quickly images and gifs could
take forever we're talking like line by line and sometimes you just wanted to
read the information on the page without all the messy graphics the slow speeds
of the time also meant that just trying to load one web page could saturate your
connection not ideal if you were trying to download something in the background
like spending two days on a napster song i definitely did that not to mention
that poorly optimized web pages could easily crash the famously unstable
internet explorer and even if that didn't happen a page with lots of rich
media could hog memory and CPU cycles slowing down other things on your pc
that weren't even related to the internet like making my solitaire end
screen slow to an unceremonious stutter the stop button was useful for getting
problematic web pages to just stop what they were doing but nowadays high speed
connections are the norm and our computers are usually powerful enough to handle a whole bunch of complex pages at
once without breaking a sweat so the stop button has declined in importance
but have you noticed that if you do try to use it
it's often the case that nothing seems to happen we'll tell you why that is
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below okay the reason that the stop button often doesn't seem to do much is
because it's not actually designed to stop all activity on a web page you see
html the language that web pages are written in is pretty simple it tells the
browser where to put text links and graphics and it also provides the
addresses where the browser can grab elements like sound and images the stop
button can stop the html itself from loading or if that's already done stop
the browser from fetching additional resources it needs like the after mentioned images
the problem is that modern web pages are made up of much more than just bare html
instead most of them also run scripts that do everything from enabling custom
web page layouts to processing information that you enter to serving
you advertisements oh boy these scripts
are basically programs that run inside your browser and as such browsers don't
want to just terminate them suddenly as this could break much of the page's
functionality or make the browser process itself unstable
instead the stop button more or less makes your browser politely ask running
scripts to stop what they're doing when they can if it's not too much trouble
please kind of like a letter from the united nations
but that doesn't mean the stop button is completely useless it can sometimes
still stop really irritating web page elements from interfering with the
content you actually want such as paywalls as long as you can hit
the stop button at exactly the right time but
you might have better luck at the county fair thanks for watching guys if you liked
this video hit like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comments section with
your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future do you guys
actually use a stop button how often do you use the stop button
like once a year once a month