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You ever just want to yell STOP IT at your web browser when it's acting up?

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Well there's actually a button that's supposed to get the browser to do exactly that.

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The STOP button. But if you've only ever used modern browsers, you might not even really have noticed it.

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It's typically a little X that occupies around the same space as the refresh button and disappears

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once the page is finished loading. But the STOP button is far from a modern invention.

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In fact, it was included in both Internet Explorer 1.0 and Netscape Navigator 1.0.

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And it was really important. Back then, the STOP button did pretty much what it does now.

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Stopped the web page from loading. But why exactly would you want that if you clicked on the link to begin with?

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Well back in the old days, we were all using those painfully slow 28 or 56K if you were

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lucky dial-up connections, meaning that web pages took a long time to load.

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And although plain text often loaded fairly quickly, images and gifs could take forever.

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We're talking like line by line. And sometimes, you just wanted to read the information on the page without all the messy

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graphics. The slow speeds of the time also meant that just trying to load one web page could saturate

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your connection. Not ideal if you were trying to download something in the background.

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Like spending two days on an appster song. Not to mention that poorly optimized web pages could easily crash the famously unstable

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Internet Explorer and even if that didn't happen, a page with lots of rich media could

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hog memory and CPU cycles, slowing down other things on your PC that weren't even related

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to the Internet, like making my solitaire end screen slow to an unceremonious stutter.

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The stop button was useful for getting problematic web pages to just stop what they were doing.

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But nowadays, high speed connections are the norm and our computers are usually powerful

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enough to handle a whole bunch of complex pages at once without breaking a sweat.

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So the stop button has declined in importance.

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But have you noticed that if you do try to use it, it's often the case that nothing

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seems to happen. Okay, the reason that the stop button often doesn't seem to do much is because it's

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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.

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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.

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The stop button can stop the HTML itself from loading.

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Or if that's already done, stop the browser from fetching additional resources it needs

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like the aforementioned images. The problem is that modern web pages are made up of much more than just bare HTML.

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Instead, most of them also run scripts that do everything from enabling custom web page

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layouts to processing information that you enter to serving you advertisements.

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Oh boy. These scripts are basically programs that run inside your browser.

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And as such, browsers don't want to just terminate them suddenly as this could break

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much of the page's functionality or make the browser process itself unstable.

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Instead, the stop button more or less makes your browser politely ask running scripts

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to stop what they're doing when they can if it's not too much trouble, please.

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Kind of like a letter from the United Nations. But that doesn't mean the stop button is completely useless.

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It can sometimes still stop really irritating web page elements from interfering with the

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content you actually want, such as paywalls.

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As long as you can hit the stop button at exactly the right time.

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But you might have better luck at the county fair.

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Thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with

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your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future. Do you guys actually use the stop button?

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How often do you use the stop button, like once a year, once a month?